


Reflections on Skaro

by mary_pseud



Series: Damnatio Memoriae [9]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alien Invasion, Eugenics, Gen, Human Experimentation, Human Experiments, M/M, Military, Military dictatorship, Thal-Kaled War, Thousand Year War, Time Travel, cloning, kaled/thal war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-09-29 08:46:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 16
Words: 41,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17200328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mary_pseud/pseuds/mary_pseud
Summary: The Doctor's contract: to send an alien Reflection to Skaro, just as the Daleks were being created, and help him in altering their existence. Carrying out this contract is dangerous, both to the Reflectionist - and to the Universe!





	1. Countdown to Launch

Skaro the planet was, and was not.

It was a cold and inhospitable planet, found in a dusty little corner of the universe. Its sole claim to fame was that it was the home planet of the Kaleds, whose mutated and genetically pruned descendants would become the fearsome Daleks. That was fame enough.

Thousands of years' worth of war had been waged here: the Kaleds against the other native race, the Thals; Kaled against Kaled; Dalek against all, even Dalek against Dalek. And the wars had not been waged just on Skaro. The Daleks had spread out and brought the Universe to its knees before them. And they had travelled not only in space, but also in time. And so had their enemies.

Skaro was the centre from which a stream of tangled timelines surged out, each one fighting to be 'real.' As each battle was lost, the losers would drop into the past and try to stop the battle before it started; the victors would surge forward, to consolidate their hold throughout time. The planet had been destroyed, and remade, and camouflaged, and hidden, and revealed.

It was a small world, rocky and cold, far away from its sun. Life hung on here tightly - or it did not hang on at all.

* * *

 

 

In a place that was set at a strange angle from Earth, a man named Cadfael Jones came through the Gateway and gazed upon an underground world. Yellow sky, twining grasses, twisted trees and here and there, the signs of life: stone houses, strange little temples, a vehicle drawn by animals that never walked on the surface of this planet. It was both serene and bizarre, like a holiday resort designed by Dali.

Looking around, he couldn't see anything like a guide. He rummaged around in his jacket and found his folding binoculars; those showed him that one of the distant houses, the one with the maze of fences around it, had two slim banners flying from its peak. One purple flag and one pinkish. Personal presence banners, he had been told to look for them. He started walking towards that house, avoiding the plants that reached for his boots as he passed.

To himself he muttered, "Wish I had a-" and then he physically bit his tongue, held it between his teeth to still it. He did NOT want a cigarette, he did not NEED a cigarette, he had never smoked in his life! And if that damn Smokin' hadn't got so sloppy with her transference technique, he wouldn't want one now.

Even though he did, in fact have a pack of cigarettes with him. And it would do him no harm, as he walked down a narrow path worn through the grass, to trace the pack through the pocket of his jacket. No harm, surely, in taking one out and lighting it-

He didn't put it to his lips though; with his face locked in a rictus of distaste, blond brows locked in a frown over his broad nose, he deliberately held it arms' length by his side, watching the smoke waft away, seeing the ash trickle off it in the wind. Damn that Smokin', infecting the lot of us with her perverse habits! That was one of the side effects of being part of a semi-communal mind: bad habits could propagate through thought, the same way diseases could spread through physical contact.

The house with the banners was close, and the cigarette was burnt down to the filter. He didn't want to throw it on the ground, and was poised on one leg, crushing out the coal on the sole of his boot, when an appropriately smoky voice asked, "Aren't you done cooking that?"

His hand jumped and the butt went flying. Something mauve and bumpy pounced out of the bushes and seized the cigarette in one rather human-looking hand before it hit the ground. Cadfael took one leap to the right and then came around to face the thing, hands out from his sides a little ways, ready to strike or to reach for weapons. He shook his shoulders to resettle the heavy backpack he carried, and waited for the next move. He'd heard that the people he was meeting kept some very odd pets, sentient and otherwise.

The mauve thing sniffed at the cigarette butt, then licked it with a narrow black tongue. It looked at him with pale eyes set in a puffy, throbbing head and remarked, "Are you supposed to unwrap them before you eat them?"

Cadfael coughed deeply, and then coughed again in a less threatening manner. "That's, ah, not food. It's an addictive drug. Nicotine, tobacco. It's not usually eaten."

The mauve thing folded itself in a resting pose, but continued staring at him. "You don't eat it? Hm. Well, I suppose I shouldn't try a bite, despite how savoury it smells. Are you a traveller?"

"I am Cadfael Jones, representing JHive. I am here to meet with Avva Omet-J of the Sast. We have decided to take the initiative and go ahead with the Launch, in the matter of the Skaro contract."

The mauve thing's face flushed purple. "Creating a Reflection and Launching from this little planet? Without offworld authorisation?" It started to uncoil from its pose, staring at him all the while.

"The fast hand grabs the fruit," said Cadfael, and remarked internally how the mauve thing's uncoiling brought it just a little bit closer to him with each move. He deliberately stepped back, and the mauve thing bared square white teeth.

"I shall be glad to take you up to see her, then," said the thing, and started trotting down the path on four legs. Cadfael did a quick jog to catch up, and followed close. They wove through a series of irregular paddocks, most of which stood empty. Some of them were populated with mouldy-looking birds, or frothing white things that rather reminded him of the soap bubbles from Scrub-A-Dub commercials. These must be more of the 'pets'. There wasn't any driveway or walkway up to the house, which was now looming over them: a low stone structure with an incongruously geometric yellow metal roof. Just a few trodden paths through the grass, and those were barely worn. Not a social centre, it seemed.

He asked, a little out of breath, "Are you - part of the household?" Maybe this was the equivalent of a sheepdog.

"Part of the household? Well, you could say that. You could say," and the mauve thing stood on its hind legs, converting effortlessly from four-legged to bipedal locomotion, "that I am the man of the house. For suitably open values of the word 'man,' that is."

Cadfael raised one eyebrow. "You're Tragan?" He took two long steps back. Out of Tragan's reach.

"Someone has warned you. A pity," said Tragan, blinking in a sleepy manner. "Do come in anyway. Avva will be delighted to have company, I'm sure."

The door opened to Tragan's touch, revealing a single massive room built around a central fireplace with a raised hearth and freestanding chimney. The ceiling was not wood, interestingly; the centre part of it was a maze of elaborate machinery, with several lit ports hanging open between the multiple finned branches of the chimney. Ah, then the roof was probably considerably more than just a roof.

Sitting by the fire with a cup in her hand was a pale young woman with purple stripes running diagonally across her face, starting about mid-cheek and thickening out into visible ridges at the edge of her jaw. Her eyes widened at the sight of Tragan's company.

"Avva, be pleased to make the acquaintance of Cadfael Jones," he intoned, and Cadfael gave a full formal bow/curtsy with two hand twists at the end. Avva's stripes flushed dark, and she rose and bowed in return. Then she stood erect and looked with a bit of disapproval at Tragan's lanky and unclothed form.

"Perhaps you could go-"

"I was just going to go-"

and they finished together "take a bath," and then laughed. Tragan strolled off to the left, where a modern looking glass and steel door was set into a small stone room - a steam bath? - while Avva gestured to a chair and said, "Please, sit down."

Cadfael did so, putting his backpack to one side and absently loosening the lacings on one boot. Avva went on. "I should apologise for Tragan, he seems to be going a bit wild-"

"I heard that!" shouted Tragan from the steam bath.

"-I mean, my charming and telepathic husband is getting in touch with his natural side."

"MUCH better," came Tragan's voice, and Avva smiled.

Cadfael said, "I'd heard that he was not particularly humanoid, but I didn't realise that Naglons could be quadrupeds. Where's his face?"

"In a jar by the door, I believe. He only wears it when we travel here and there, and we hardly ever do." Avva smiled a lazy and contented smile. "Me the galaxy-spanning pilot, him the sadistic sensualist, and we both end up on a farm in the dark end of nowhere - literally nowhere in Euclidean space, at least. And I've never been happier."

"I hope my news will only add to your happiness, then," said Cadfael formally.

"Do tell," said Tragan, coming back draped in a heavy yellow robe. His sleekly combed hair looked oddly inappropriate over his rippling face. He sat on the rim of the fireplace, with the flames at his back, and casually twined feet with Avva, interlacing his twelve toes with her ten. And they both listened, as Cadfael talked.

"When you arrived on Earth, Pilot Avva, you brought a copy of a contract negotiated between the Sast and the alien known as the Doctor." JHive and the Sast were the same organisation underneath, that is, two different expressions of the alien thought-travellers known as the Reflectionists. Avva was just on leave from her species, so to speak. "We have evaluated this contract, thoroughly, and believe we have the resources to fulfill it. Of course, any Reflectionist group who received the contract is immediately obligated to consider working it."

Avva chuckled. "Careless of them, broadcasting the contract while we were still in the area."

"They did not know you were alive, and available with the proper equipment in place to intercept and decode it." In fact, they had thought that Avva and Tragan had just committed suicide in a highly spectacular fashion. "The contract gives a time: the distant past. And a place: a planet called Skaro."

"The home planet of the Daleks," said Tragan, and coughed wetly and inhumanly.

"The contract," Cadfael paused for emphasis, and then repeated, "The contract, is to meet the Doctor in his own past, when he was sent to Skaro to change the Daleks at the moment of their creation. And to offer him assistance. We know when he will arrive; more importantly, we know whom he will meet there. Who can be trusted, and who cannot. Avva, in the matter of this contract, you have the right of first acceptance." Cadfael looked at her expectantly.

Avva paused as though waiting for him to continue, and then tucked her head back on her neck in a smirk. "Me? I could never fulfill that contract. I don't have the Reflection-focussing equipment or the personality integrity to hold and Launch a Reflection of myself. My mind-modelling is" and she spat out a series of codes that made nothing to Tragan, but made Cadfael swallow and pale.

"I see," the visitor said, a bit embarrassed, the way you would be to have someone drop into conversation that they were sterile. It was supposed to be the ambition of every Reflectionist to make new copies of their minds, new Reflections, and send them out into the universe, but apparently not Avva. She didn't seem abashed at all; instead she looked like she was pondering something.

"This Doctor has made contract to change his own time line," said Avva, absently picking her teeth with one nail. "And he is a time traveller, a Time Lord of Gallifrey, to be exact. He knows the consequences of altering the time stream. Doesn't he realise that his own existence is threatened?"

"He made the contract of his own free will."

"Did he?" Avva leaned forward. "I got the distinct impression from the video portion of the contract that he was in some distress. Regeneration instability." She remembered the little man with the ruffled brown hair, how his face had looked both fierce and lost as he spoke to the Sast. "Taking advantage of the unbalanced in a way that could destroy them - that can hardly reflect well on us."

"The telepath's transcript attached to the contract makes it clear that the Doctor knew what might happen. That he chose the danger. If the contract succeeds, the Daleks will never destroy the planet Gallifrey. To save his people, the Doctor is willing to die himself." Now Cadfael shrugged. "And who knows? He could survive."

"Maybe." Avva did not sound convinced. "But he is the last of the Time Lords. We Sast tread lightly where they once strode as gods, without a thousandth of their power. Many Reflectionist Hives won't even dabble in time travel. The time-stress on the Doctor when his two time lines finally equalise, with none of the Gallifreyan safeguards in place - that could be quite a spectacular intersection."

"We'll try to make sure that none of us are standing near the Doctor when it happens," said Cadfael dryly. "Jhive has the necessary equipment here on Earth to create a Reflection. In most aspects it will be a standard Launch of a Reflection; it is just that the source point of the Reflection, the one who will send out the personality-meme and information pattern-matrix, will be sensitised to the correct Skaro time-space coordinates, and will carry the necessary contract specifications."

Tragan's face flushed red for an instant, in curiosity. "Won't another Reflectionist group have already Launched in support of this contract?"

"Unlikely. They are mopping up after the Sast/Naglon war. Only the main Hive in this galactic arm, and JHive here on Earth, know of this contract."

"So you can scoop them, to use the local dialect. Spread your Reflection over Skaro and adjoining space. If your Reflection meets another, they shall combine and thrive; if they meet no others, they shall flourish in solitude." Avva's eyes were bright as she grinned. "A most productive contract, if Jhive fulfils it. I am pleased to offer whatever aid I can."

Her partner was not so sure. "Is there any group on Earth who might detect this Launch? UNIT, perhaps?" Tragan was justly leery of these Earth secret groups, and he had tangled with UNIT personnel before, to his sorrow.

"UNIT is rather under strength at the moment; their funding is in flux I hear. There is a separate group currently based in England that has off world detection equipment, but one of us has already put in his resume, and will be embedded by the time of our Launch." Ianto was a charming fellow, thought Cadfael. "He'll do for us. A little software patch, and they'll never spot us leaving. Or rather, Launching."

"So what do you need from me?" asked Avva. "You already have the contract. I've given up right of first acceptance."

"We request that you review the contract personally with our source point. Make sure that we have crossed all our thetas, and not overlooked some subtle Sast interpretation of the document. The Universe is our mirror, and every Reflection a little bit different, as the saying goes. A telepath will be on hand for information exchange that can’t be expressed verbally." Psychic powers among the Earth Reflectionists were rare and cherished; the presence of a telepath was another measure of how important this Launch would be. "You are also the Reflectionist who had the most recent contact with the Doctor."

"Humph. All we did was toss him out the door of the Righteous Flea," grumped Tragan. "If I'd known who he was, I'd have thrown him harder."

Avva shot him a look. "You did considerably more with that Sarah-Jane Smith, as I recall." Then she turned back to Cadfael. "And what payment do you offer for my consulting services?" She was quite liberal in terms of what currency she accepted: gold, galactic credits, food, sexual services…all were welcome.

Cadfael opened the backpack that sat by his knee, showing the contents: a padded foam box, and peering out of it, an assortment of brightly coloured flat packets. "I have some offerings for The Collection."

Avva smiled, widely. "You know me too well."

Cadfael and Avva clambered up into the room above, which was in fact a rather small spaceship. As they climbed, the still-seated Tragan ran his eyes over Cadfael, observing his thickly muscled arms and the sleek lines of his body. He looked like he would strip well, and also fight well. Promising.

In one of the side rooms of the spaceship known as the Righteous Flea was The Collection. Films and recordings here from hundreds of worlds: movies, news, plays, opera, sensuals, sports, vinnio - everything imaginable and many things unimaginable. Plus the most advanced audio-visual system on the planet, with Experienced Reality, holographic output, multi-lingual translation capabilities, and probably Smell-O-Rama if you asked for it. And the index (named prosaically enough L'Index) that allowed you to search the Collection by everything from alternative title to sky colours to background music score.

In the Earth section of the Collection, the titles that Cadfael could read tended towards strange and bizarre films. JHive had been generous with their messenger's offering; they wanted Avva's help.

"These titles were chosen by the one who will be Reflected," said Cadfael, and Avva looked at him and purred her tongue against the roof of her mouth in a strange but not unpleasant noise.

"I like his taste. Or her taste."

"Couldn't say," said Cadfael promptly. "The source point has already gone into anonymity."

"Hmm. You are taking this Launch seriously - ah, the lost Szukalski film! From the original negative, the note says!"

"Transferred just for you - the print was, ah, discreetly borrowed from the Disney archives." Avva lost herself in sorting the discs and tapes, and Cadfael cleared his throat and waited. Then he waited a few more moments. It seemed clear that Avva had forgotten he was there. He deliberately scraped his boot across the nap of the room's incredibly lurid rug, and she looked up and said, "Um?"

"I don't want to impose on your hospitality, Avva Omet-J. I can see that you are busy. I'll just leave a note saying where you can meet our guide, who will take you to meet the source-point," he said, scribbling out a note on a piece of paper. He handed it to her, and she put it aside and immediately went back to minutely comparing the boxes of two different editions of 'The Terror of the Tongs.'

Cadfael waited another minute for politeness' sake, and then excused himself. "I think I'll be going now, if you don't mind," he said. "Enjoy the films!"

"Oh, I love this Frazetta cover!" she said, apparently not hearing a word he had said. So Cadfael agilely lowered himself into the main room, stepped fast to the door, opened it - and saw a flash of yellow out of the corner of his eye.

Cadfael turned on his heel and stepped out the door, backwards. He continued moving backwards, slowly, dragging his feet to feel his way. He had been warned never to turn his back on Tragan, who was gliding after him. His alien face flushed with colours, mauve and purple and crimson as blood. The yellow robe made a hissing noise as it dragged along the ground, and Tragan was hissing as well, like a snake in sight of its prey.

"Leaving so soon?" the alien whispered. "But we've barely got to know one another. Why not stay and enjoy my personal hospitality?"

"I've heard about your hospitality, and I'd rather keep all my limbs, thank you. Avva is warming up the video system, why not join her?" They were out among the livestock pens now. Without warning, the big black lump in the paddock he was passing grew eyes, lots of eyes, lots of green glowing eyes, and a mouth, and yelled, "RICHARD PARKER!"

Cadfael yipped, and jumped; Tragan's face paled with amusement.

"Shush shush, you," Tragan admonished the lump, turning to soothe it. "Be still. There's no Richard here. You should keep calm; your colour isn't good at all."

"Who's Richard Parker?" asked Cadfael, taking Tragan's pause as a chance to gain a few more metres of distance between them.

"Hmm, I'm not quite sure. Someone it ate, I suppose," Tragan answered, rubbing at the thing's, well, it didn't have a head so technically he was just rubbing at its top. He seemed distracted by his creature.

"YEEE!" came the distant voice of Avva from inside the house. "Traaaaagan, come HERE! It's 'Docteur Jekyll et Les Femmes'! Uncensored!"

Tragan went pink to the ears and turned to the house, but looked back at Cadfael. "Later," he whispered, in what for him was a seductive tone. He dragged his fingers over and through the lump's flesh, leaving wet glowing furrows that healed as they watched. The lump moaned.

"Never," said Cadfael, his voice shaky. He backed away, both of them tied together only by their stares. "Not in my lifetime."

"Later," purred Tragan, before walking back towards the house. Cadfael turned and ran, wanting to get at much distance between him and the house of the yellow roof.

"Next time…we should send…a messenger squid," he gasped to himself.

* * *

 

On Skaro, there were people who were the focus of attention across a thousand thousand timelines, although they did not know it yet. Their names would live on in infamy, would burn in glory. And among those names, the name Hif was nowhere to be found - even though his actions were to have the most spectacular effects on the future.

Hif had been born during the war, as had all Kaleds for the last thousand years. His childhood testing revealed high intellect, great concentration, and perhaps a touch too much assertiveness; in any case, his career was set before he hit puberty. He had become a military scientist.

Hif had been assigned to Supreme Commander Davros and the Bunker, the secret facility where the greatest Kaled war weapons were designed. There he had survived and thrived. His excessive assertiveness was tempered by a touch of overweening pride; it gave him the detached, arrogant belief that yelling at the fools around him was not worth the effort. This saved his life, more times than he ever noticed. Davros did not care to have his will questioned. Hif did his work, and made the appropriate suggestions and recommendations. Like all the scientists in the Bunker he was phenomenally gifted, and the talents that would have made him a new Edison on any other world were here bent to the harness of war alone. He wore the harness, trudged along, but under it all he nursed his own plans.

He was passionately determined to make a difference, prove his own theories, make his own mark. This was a problem. In the Bunker, there was one leader, one Supreme Commander: Davros. His was the sole hand that guided all of their united efforts, and if he was not interested in a line of research, it was as though it had never been. Hif's theories were radical, and completely at odds with what Davros saw as the future of the war and of the Kaled people. After one rebuff too many, Hif publicly gave up his researches. With the key word being, publicly.

Secretly, Hif gathered equipment. The Bunker was far larger than it needed to be: it had been planned and constructed centuries ago, and had not taken into account the relentless drop in Kaled population due to both war and environmental poisoning. There were empty labs, vacant operating suites, entire sections where the staff almost never went.

He worked the stockrooms like a master, filching equipment only when it was about to be recycled, and substituting salvaged bits of scrap in their place. He forged requisitions, altered refresh priorities, and even partitioned off a section of the computer for his own use. His private stores grew in secret: a long metal tank, containers of nutrient material, DNA samples.

When Davros' mutant test subjects needed to be educated, he was the one who came up with the implants that would allow them to communicate directly with the computer. He gave all his attention to that portion of the project - it seemed. In private, he was working on how to use these implants to communicate, not mutant to machine, but mind to mind.

It took weeks to dig up and study the Bunker electrical protocols, to find out how he could draw power for his own research without triggering alarms. Years, to perform his small-scale tests. For every hundred failures, there was the smallest hint of success. But Hif kept on, stubborn. He saw a future for their race, and it was not Davros' future: it was greater, greater than that shattered old man could ever see. But he needed to prove that his vision of the future was true. He needed to create something spectacular, something that would prove once and for all that he was right and Davros was wrong. Something that would bring all of the Elite onto his side at once. Even Davros.

It would be worth it, he knew that. It would be worth it.

 

* * *

 

Deep under the tunnels and sewers of a large North American city, there was a room. The room was dim and filled with the hum of machinery. Lots of it. Tiny lights flickering in the dark, the occasional lighted dial, were all that could be seen. 

Avva was finishing her discussions with the JHive representative, the woman whose Reflection was going to be Launched out into space and time. Although they had shared many words and a meal, she still had no idea what the other Reflectionist actually looked like. The woman was wearing a mask that covered her face and hair, and in the dimness the outlines of her body were only faintly visible.

"Is the mask really necessary?" Avva asked.

There was the hint of a laugh under the woman's flat American accent. "A precaution. If someone comes looking for the source point of my Reflection, there will be hundreds, if not thousands of JHive members who could have sent it."

"But you will know your own name, surely? If they interrogated your Reflection directly-"

"No, actually. I am leaving my name behind, along with certain other personal memories. Or rather, they will be edited out of my Reflection. It is easier that way; it gives the Reflections more room to find their own identities, their own names. Once the signal is received back from whatever colony or colonies I have founded, then they shall know me as their Source."

She rose, and Avva stood as well. Stepping close, the slender Sast woman pressed her lips about where the other woman's should be, under the mask.

"Be bright, sister. Shine your Reflection before us all!" And Avva left.

A new light blinked on, and shone down on the narrow medical table, where the Reflectionist was making her final preparations before Launch. She had uncovered her flushed face, and her mane of red-gold hair was sleeked back. She carefully snaked her head down into the basket of electrical connections, twitching this and that one until all lay flat against her scalp, and then closed her eyes.

Out of the darkness, a smooth male voice addressed her.

"This is our final contact before Launch. Let's review what we are doing here, so that it will be the most recent thing in your mind when you land."

Her reply had a hint of the drone in it; she had repeated this over and over again, through briefings and training and salary discussions. "When the machine triggers, it will make an exact copy of the electrical fields of my brain, replicate that neural pattern reflection as many times as the matrix can be sustained, which could be ten copies or a thousand, enclose each Reflection in a self-sustaining energy shell and then send it out.

“Those copies of me will travel out, through time and space, across the galaxy and the universe, and find a place that can support sentient life. There, the energy shell will insert a copy of my personality into a body - a body that has been emptied of mind by disease, or madness, or even death. Once I am in that body, I will use it and all of my abilities to make that planet a better place for my being there, and ultimately, lead it into joining the Reflectionists. But," a tear leaked out from beneath closed eyelids, and her voice quavered, "but what goes out is a copy of me. I will never see or feel what - she - does. She is my sister, and she is going out into the great dark alone."

"Not alone forever," the voice in the darkness replied. "If she succeeds..."

"If she succeeds, we will all meet on the Last Day, or before, and be one again. We will share our memories, our triumphs and failures, our lives and our deaths. We will dance on the grave of Time itself, and all our stories will become part of the One Great Story. The serial rights alone should make us rich!" She needed that gloating to boost her ego, for what was to come would be a particular flavour of hell.

It was not usual for a Reflectionist to carry around all knowledge in the Reflectionist group mind, at all times: it would strain the current capacity of the craniums that most of them were wearing on Earth. But for a Launch of this nature, the Reflection would have to be prepared. To bring knowledge, reams of knowledge, great stepped palaces and fantasias of information, interlaced like a thousand thousand spiderwebs, gleaming like the suns of a hundred galaxies.

They called this great sum of knowledge the Thousand Crowns, and the one who was to be Launched would have to take up as many as were possible, to imprint into the Reflection along with their own personality, and Launch with them. To rebuild a world like Skaro, every weapon would have to be near at hand. So the machines reached out, and through. Minds linked, and focussed. And the Crowns were called down upon her:

Memory editing, personality construction, animal husbandry, culture sculpting, soul cultivation, mechanical analysis, cosmological torque, inertialess navigation, Uplift, child rearing, gene assembly, military strategy, intercultural communication, nano-electronics, work flow management, combat, pyromancy, telepathgestion. And more. And more. And more.

Films, books, novels, plays, songs, paintings, scents, from a thousand worlds were laid one by one across her brow, and taken in. This load would have stopped the heart of many, but JHive had chosen well. This one was as greedy as she was stubborn, and even though the Crowns would pass from her when the Launch was made, still she gritted her teeth and demanded more, more, more!

And while her mind was focussed on gorging itself with knowledge, the machine laid new fingers across her self, tenderly shielding the core of her personality, her name, her birthplace, from the replication equipment.

The voice out of the darkness sounded like the owner was grinning as it said, "Ready to go?"

"Yes!" she gasped.

She clenched her fists, body tense and mind locked solid as stone, as the machinery beeped more and more frantically, light blinking, banks of equipment charging to full capacity, as it moved into its highest gear and - Launched!

* * *

 

Through the trackless voids of time and space, empty of all but chaos, myriad Reflections flew outward and onward …

And awoke in the body of a newborn child on Arx.

And infused the body of a coma victim on Noca Verino.

And breathed into the new-sprouted bud of a sentient mould on Yuggoth.

And slipped into the body of a dying man on Roco - and died with him.

Thousands of copies, thousands of Reflections. Each one delighting in where they landed, either to grow and thrive, or to be crushed and ignored. Delighting even to die, savouring the sensations of physical death. Letting their souls fly free, to meet again perhaps on the Last Day. But always sparing a moment to send the best wishes of their heart (or equivalent organ{s}) to that Reflection that would awaken on a certain planet, in a certain time…


	2. The Landing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Reflectionist arrives on Skaro.

Hif was scheduled for his annual medical exam soon, and he did not want it. He was dying.

Well of course they were all dying, but his death had its finger on the trigger, as one would say. Cancer was sliding its way through his system with pain-tipped fingers, drawn there by too much exposure to various unpleasant toxins. He had done his own medical tests, and looked bleakly at the results the computer gave him before crumpling up the readout sheet and dropping it into the incinerator.

It was entirely possible that the cellular damage he had taken while working on Davros' latest projects was the reason for his oncoming death - another whip to drive him on to complete his work. To create something so spectacular that none would be able to gainsay him. Something that might live on after him. Literally.

When it was revealed that he was dying, he would be taken from the Bunker, from all his secret work and his equipment and the creation of his labours, and sent to die in a Kaled military hospital. And he could not bear that thought, not of death, but of all his work being for nothing! Not now!

His experiments with memory transfer were so promising! He'd got an amiloo to solve a maze perfectly in minutes, after giving it the memories of the amiloo that he'd actually trained on the maze over a period of weeks. Unfortunately he hadn't been able to test the transfer process on anything higher up on the evolutionary scale. Any prisoners who came through were either given specimen codes and sliced up fine, or given to Security and Commander Nyder, and sliced up twice as fine.

And there was a sealed incubator in one of the disused laboratories, the power and water it was processing carefully hidden from the Bunker systems. And inside it was a body - a body! A body that he had matured from a tiny blot of cells to a full, adult organism in only twenty-nine days! Maturity at nearly the Tritten limit of cellular replication! And better yet, the body had been grown not from his cells, but from one of the archived Kaled gene samples, taken before the war. It was pure, uncontaminated, alive!

But of course it had no mind; it was just a thing. For the purpose he had grown it for, it needed only a pulse. It was proof of concept that he could create an endless supply of pure Kaleds. Using them, his people could undo the war's damage to their gene pool. And if he could prove a way of infusing these bodies with knowledge - that would be beyond price.

Davros would never accept it. He had his vision, of a contaminated Skaro where the warped mutants that were all that was left of the race trundled about in tiny self-contained tanks. If he was presented with an opposing vision, he would call it reversion, self-delusion, wishful thinking. He would destroy the new Kaled body, destroy all of Hif's research, and probably destroy him as well.

Hif sat alone in his quarters, brooding. One hand was pressed deep against his stomach, where the cancer that was slowly devouring him alive was finding new pains to send him. The other hand played with a pair of dice, shaped by some unknown hand out of laboratory-issue bolts. Gambling was forbidden of course, it diverted energy from the war effort. Hif had found these tucked away in a dusty corner of the Bunker, and had kept them for himself. He rolled them, saw them both come up eights - and made his decision.

The memory transfer. The new body. He'd roll it all.

 

* * *

 

A Reflection flew…

...and landed in an empty body.

A body that had never inhabited, a newly built house where nobody had ever lived. A new glove is slipped onto the hand for the first time, and even though no other hand has ever been inside of it, it fits, perfectly. Nature abhors a vacuum, they say: and this was a vacuum that would soon be filled. This was a constructed body, an empty one, and the Reflection's mind/essence/soul quickly filled it, let the charged energy shell drive deep into every neuron, every cell of that new mind. Its task completed, the shell dissipated. The Reflection permeated the new body like smoke and suddenly it was here, whole, alive. Alive!

And then it was not alone in the body. Someone else was trying to enter it - and not another Reflection.

The memories/personality that came in, harsh and rough, distorted by transmission - they would have overwhelmed and destroyed any native mind that had been living in this body. But this was not mind against mind, but mind against Reflectionist mind: a personality buffered and reinforced, that had encountered thousands of other minds, and knew every path to connecting and sharing and sideslipping mental contact. Automatically, instinctively the Reflection seized on the incoming information, gulped it down, processed it, and made it a part of its own mind.

Language was first, grammar and spelling and inflection. And then facts, history, background, names.

These thoughts were from a man called Hif, a scientist, who was from the planet Skaro-

Skaro! Target found!

Scientist Hif was afraid, terribly afraid of the experiment he was doing. An experiment in transferring memory and consciousness from one body to the next. He was the one who had created this body in secret. He was afraid of his leader, Davros (yes, exulted the Reflection, yes, this is the time, the right place and the right time, Davros is here!) who would surely have Hif executed for this unauthorised work, diverting Bunker resources to his own ends. And the Reflection could see that he really had something to fear: the mind-to-mind transfer equipment he had built was crude, untested. Deadly stresses were accumulating in the scientist's own mind and body as the machine tried to fulfill its programming.

There was a thing that could be done, a way of making the transfer more harmonious. But in all honesty of self, it could not be done without telling the Kaled what was happening, and what would happen. The flow of information suddenly became two-way, as the alien mind reached out through the apparatus.

 

* * *

 

Hif lay rigid on the floor of his secret laboratory space, wires streaming from the metal cap on his head to an elaborate amplifier of sorts, and from here to the growth tank. His teeth were clenched as he fought not to scream. His heart thundered irregularly, and his mind felt like red-hot nails were being pounded through it, tearing it into shreds. The pain was huge, but he was determined not to scream. If the guards found him, it would mean his death. If this failed, he would die anyway. Success was life, he chanted to himself, life, life, life! Life for what he had made, even if he died.

He could feel his consciousness shifting, as though sliding into the new body. But it wasn't working. His mind seemed to be splintering: he could literally feel his self breaking, like teeth breaking on stone. Still he kept on pushing grimly, still he forced himself on. And suddenly there was a voice in his head! A voice or a thought that was not his own, low and soft and seeming to come from all around him.

~Hif, you are dying.~ Infinite compassion in those thoughts.

~Y-yes,~ he somehow thought back.

~This transfer is killing you, Hif. If you continue, you will die, but your memories will live on in what you have created, and in me. If you disengage, you may live.~

His own thoughts were mumbling things, not like the clear gleaming thoughts that he was hearing. ~Dying anyway…want to do this…~

~You will die.~

~Yes…I know…Go on.~

~Then come to me.~

There was a sudden - a sudden _inhalation_. Instead of feeling like his brain was being scraped from his head, he was falling endlessly through a grey cool twilight, pouring out himself and all he had even known into something great and warm and invisible below him.

It reached out and gathered him in. He felt himself shrinking in that embrace, to a child, to a fluttering point of consciousness.

~Goodbye, Hif. See you on the other side,~ said the softness. And a river of sweet-scented breath seemed to send him soaring, flying away, away _away_

 

* * *

 

The incubation tank was much larger than the ones used to grow the Kaled mutants that Davros was so obsessed with; it was almost as large as a person. It sat on the laboratory floor next to the amplifier, and was connected to it by a double fistful of wires. More wires streamed from it to the spliced electrical transformers and pumps and monitoring equipment that had created the life inside.

Inside the tank, there was a soft bonging noise, as though something had moved and hit the tank's side. Something pressed along the metal lid that sealed it, and with an unpleasant wet ripping noise the sterile seal was broken, and the tank opened.

The something sat up. It was a woman, her head crowned with wires and her skin gleaming with moisture. Slowly, the eyes moved. The face, dead and pale and blank, started to twitch and come to life. Suddenly, it was like a flower opening: the shoulders came up, the eyelids blinked, and the mouth - breathed. Whispered.

"Alive."

Her head turned, her eyes delighting in sight. Even the blank metal walls, the dusty shelves were marvellous. Her eyes saw the shelves full of discarded equipment, the dim lights on minimum power. And the limp form of Hif on the floor. She climbed out of the tank, revelling in the flex of muscle and sinew again, of having a new body. She went to him, staring into his face and remembering the sight of it in every mirror Hif had ever looked into, and closed his staring eyes with her fingers.

"Thank you," she whispered. "I thank you for your gift of language. I thank you for your gift of knowledge. I will never forget you. As long as I live, a part of you lives in me." She touched her fingers to her own lips, and then to his.

She started plucking the electrodes out of her long mat of black hair (fortunately her skull was not drilled full of sockets; instead each wire's flat end clung to the silvery points set flush with her skull). She rolled over Hif's memories, tasted them through, and started almost reflexively to index them properly (the way some people stored their memories! What a mess!).

She did not have Hif, of course. His personality had not been designed for transfer, and the whole had been lost: what had survived was facts and reactions and memories. But what she had from him was spectacular.

Here was a man who had created a new paradigm of cellular growth in his spare time. Who had figured out neural transmission, and invented a neural implant array, all by himself, without consultation or aid, in secret! He had the intelligence and creativity to do these things, plus the courage to lie and plunder in order to bring his theories to reality. And she could see that this level of determination, of obsession, of overwhelming devotion to a personal cause - it was normal among these people! Among the Bunker personnel he wasn't even considered exceptional.

She shook her head, slowly. She had thought the Kaleds fascinating from a distance, in the dry text of the Reflectionist contract: now that she could see them up close, mind to mind, she found admiration and love blooming in her already. What a people! If it were not for this man's efforts, she almost certainly would have woken up in the body of a dead soldier, sometime during the Thousand Years War. Her task would have been many times harder. Thanks to him, she was literally inside the Bunker, and in a fresh new body.

She patted her hands down her sides, then examined arms and legs and torso. Definitely female, standard bipedal humanoid model. Pretty much what she'd been wearing when she started out. Damn, Hif certainly gave me breeder's hips, she thought. Oh well, you wear what you get. Right now, she wanted to know: could she, should she, make another body now?

This was the most delicate time for a Reflectionist on a new planet: that time when there was only one, alone and only. The energy shell that had forced her Reflection into this body was gone; she would have to use local equipment to start making more copies of herself, and infusing them with her memories. And considering how precarious her situation was, she thought that she should start making a new copy of herself right now. Fortunately she already had Hif's amplifier, and the incubation tank where he had grown this body. She could grow another body, if only she had enough nutrient solution.

On second thought, she had something that could be used to make more nutrient solution. Nothing that the Kaleds were not already doing to their war dead, anyway. She touched him softly, in farewell. "Dear Hif. Thank you for all that you have given me. I swear to use it well."

She stripped the body and took the clothes for herself (the shoes didn't fit), and then rolled the corpse across the floor and to the incubation tank. With a lunging strain on her new muscles she managed to lift him high enough to get him into the tank. She placed the steel cover back in place, and let the rendering process start working on the tank's contents, turning it from a body into a supply of growth medium. Within a matter of hours, there was going to be nothing left of Hif but goo. She would have to wait for the process to run its course before she could determine the settings for creating a new body; if there wasn't enough growth medium, her second body would have to be short.

She had done what she needed to do in the physical world. Now it was time she stepped inside, and put her new mind in order.

She lay there, on the cold floor of the vacant laboratory, in the Bunker, on Skaro, and she dreamed awake. In the slowed time of dreams she moved, ordering and arranging the great towers and shapes of her knowledge, and making a space for Hif's knowledge there as well. The knowledge of his mind was very little compared to hers - a child's building blocks, stacked beside a skyscraper - but still she honoured his memories, still she put them in a fine and high place within her own thoughts. She who had borne the Thousand Crowns now compacted and summarised the data she had carried within her: upon the crown called Skaro, the memories of Hif would be the first jewel.

She dreamed the contract. In her memories she saw another's memories, of a man in a pinstriped suit, speaking with the Sast, humanoid and otherwise. They stood at the controls of the TARDIS, that fabulous time-travel machine that she had never seen. The Doctor's words echoed in her mind: "It's not just that you do this manipulation of time, it's that you do it so well! So deftly! The slightest touch, and enemies become friends, wars become ritual conflicts, the paths of nations and planets flow better again."

The slightest touch, indeed: because this contract was to change the timeline of a Time Lord. If she created too great a deviation, the Time Lords would be alerted. It was important that those people the Doctor had embedded his memories of in the contract be here: she could not just kill Davros, for example, even though that would certainly divert the creation of the Daleks. That would cause a massive contradiction whiplashing through time, negating her efforts and probably herself. The Doctor must have the choices offered to him that he had been offered before. It was the results of his choices that were going to be just a little bit different.

In her dreams she smiled. And did you think we would leave Skaro, Doctor? Make sure someone was looking the wrong way at the right time, arrange a diverted patrol, sabotage Davros' ground vehicle, and then fade away? Oh no, dear Doctor, oh no. We're staying here.

Then she dreamed her past, her home world, her journey; she dreamed her present, on an alien world wracked by war; and she dreamed a fabulous and ambitious future, herself with a thousand sisters and daughters, sons and husbands, green fields and trees heavy with fruit. The contract fulfilled, and this planet transformed. Her family, her people, reaching up to the stars and grasping the hands and limbs of her fellow Reflectionists, sharing what she had learned, learning from them.

She dreamed hard and rose knowing what she had to do.

The Tritten cycle: how she hated it already! But even with her knowledge and Hif's combined, she could see no way around it: the Tritten biological cycle of cellular growth dictated that the absolute minimum amount of time it would take her to grow and integrate a new body in this tank was twenty days. Hif had taken twenty-nine, but she knew some subtleties of chemical conditioning that could be imposed using even this crude equipment. She was seeing the entire Kaled biological cycle from the outside at once - something that not half a dozen men in Skaro could hold entire in their minds - and she could see plainly how releasing this protein here, inhibiting this reaction there, would speed up growth by nearly a third. It would be a miracle, a fully-grown adult body in only twenty days. She just wished that there was a way of making that twenty minutes.

Fortunately she had everything she needed here: water, power, raw materials thanks to Hif, her own tissue to start it, and the memory transfer equipment: the amplifier, and the neural array made of a metallic substance that would set in the new body's brain without requiring delicate surgery. She even had other DNA samples that Hif had acquired to play with. Later, later.

But she didn't have later. Not even twenty days. Hif had disappeared, here from the facility that nobody left without authorisation, and a room-by-room search was inevitable once his absence was noticed. This room absolutely must not be searched, so she had to leave it. She had to decide: should she allow herself to be captured? Or should she escape the Bunker?

The Kaled city tempted her, contamination and all: a vast dome meant to cover millions, now barely populated. If she could get in and hide away, there should be space aplenty for the building of more of her. But the high-end electronics for the memory transfer itself might be impossible to come by, and she did not have time to break down this equipment.

On the other hand – this was the Bunker, the Kaled centre of technology and power, home of the Elite. Davros was here, the greatest scientist on the planet, the man who was even now in the process of creating the Daleks. If she could only find a place to win here, think what works she could accomplish!

It was unlikely that she could ever win a place here, though. Kaled women were rare and protected, deep inside the Dome – protected from learning, from doing, from anything except breeding more little soldiers and soldier-breeders. The odds of any Kaled man accepting a woman as an intellectual equal were slim to none; they would know, absolutely, that she could not have any education.

Drat Hif, why would he make his experimental subject female? But the answer was there too: a genetically pure female was invaluable as breeding stock, even if her mind was empty. It was only Hif's final fear of death and failure that had made him attempt the memory transfer. The Doctor had never seen any Kaled women, so he had not been able to warn the Sast about this unusual situation.

She thought, she judged, she planned. She acted.

Hif had been careful to hide his equipment, and she honoured his care as she rebuilt his camouflage. She slid the tank behind a heavily laden shelf; with its indicator lights popped out of their sockets, anyone coming in would see only inactive equipment. Carefully, quietly, she started the growth cycle, using a bit of skin bitten from her cuticle as the initial culture. The flowmetal depositors were in place, waiting for the brain to start to form; they would automatically set the neural sockets in place and let them grow along with the new body. No way to say precisely where they would end up; hopefully her sister-to-be would not end up with sockets between her teeth or in her eye.

She noted to herself that there was excellent medical suspension technology built into this tank; even if the power and water were interrupted, the system would hold the growing body whole and waiting for new energy. It was almost up to the standards of a Sast suspension field. The memory transfer amplifier was put inside a box and carefully labelled Contaminated – Archival – Do Not Dispose Of.

She lay for a long time with her ear to the floor, in the dark, listening to the thump of the patrol's boots as they went up and down the floor. She timed them to the beat of her heart. It was night cycle, and the patrols were farther apart. Hif must not have been missed yet.

She closed her eyes and concentrated, but she couldn't get visual information from the implants in her head; that would require a further level of refinement of the implants, it seemed. A pity. She'd always wanted eyes in the back of her head. Instead she wrapped her long dark hair as close to her head as she could manage, and covered it with one of Hif's socks – also white fortunately. She hoped to scuttle along the floor, below the range of the cameras, until she could get down to the next level. Hif had known of ways to get out of the Bunker using the ventilation shafts; she was hoping to hide somewhere, in the caves around the Bunker, perhaps even in the Dome itself, and then come back in twenty days to fill the new body with her mind.

She prayed. Alone in the dark, she touched her hand to her throat and raised the other in salute to something not there.

"I ask for wisdom, I ask for strength, I ask for luck. Give me the power and I shall reap a harvest here that shall be the legend of legends!"

Then, she was gone.


	3. Application Received

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Reflectionist meets Davros and Nyder.
> 
> (Content warning at the end of the chapter)

She was almost to the elevator shaft when she heard a Security patrol approaching. She paused, drawing into a corner. She had dodged other patrols, but this was getting too dangerous. She had to get out of the corridors. If she could get into one of the labs on this floor, and drop down a ventilation shaft (without breaking her neck), maybe she'd be able to get down into the lower levels without exposing herself further.

And maybe the war would end, as Hif would have said. Bitter sarcastic fellow, she would have liked to have known him when he was in better condition.

She opened the door of the laboratory beside her, and slipped in. It was dark and cool and quiet, deserted. The only light shone on a marker board covered with elaborate formula and diagrams of some sort of machine.

She looked at it in passing, as she moved through the laboratory towards the ventilation shaft.

Then she went back and looked harder. Now this…this was outlining the requirements of a power exchange system for a self-contained vehicle, very small. And something was wrong with the formulas. She knew she shouldn't waste time with this, but an unsolved problem was the proverbial monkey jar to her: she couldn't help but stop and try to fix it.

A personality flaw you should have deleted before you left, she thought. Resolutely she stepped away, and towards the ventilator grille. She opened it, and gazed in dismay at a passage too small for her to fit anything larger than her arm through. Now what?

She put the grille back, and then, to distract herself (surely, only to distract herself from her predicament), she picked up a pen and went to the marker board. There was something unbalanced, in the upper right-hand side of the formulas. Hah! They'd carried that number over, when they should have divided! She could see that a multitude of hands had worked on this, in various handwritings, no reason why she couldn't…NO! She was not going to sit here and work on this until she was caught!

She heard another patrol march by outside, and then they were past. OK now, time to go. But - she put down her pen, and picked up a red one. She drew a circle around the offending section of the equation and wrote 'DIVIDE', capped the pen, put it down - and heard a whisper of breath behind her.

She turned. Sitting in the darkness was a man, or what was left of one. He looked like someone had mummified him without bothering to kill him first: a withered face and bald head, with the remnants of his body wired to an elaborate transport chair. Except for the rise and fall of his chest under a black tunic, and the quivering of the one black-nailed hand, she might have thought this some ancestor's corpse, being brought around for symbolic religious purposes.

Of course, she knew better. This man would have been recognised anywhere on Skaro.

"Davros," she said, and inclined her head.

Davros paid her no attention; the chair moved silently towards the board. His eyes were gone, but a vision implant in the middle of his forehead served to give him sight. It was impossible to tell exactly where Davros was 'looking', but all his attention seemed to be on the board. Then the chair turned to her.

"How did you know where the error was?" he asked, in a mechanical rasp; inside she winced at how his teeth were stained from the regimen of drugs necessary to keep him alive. "I have been looking at that board for two hours! How!"

She stood very straight and thought very fast. To her credit she never even considered physically overwhelming the Kaled scientist and getting away; he was too frail, and too precious, to risk damaging. If she couldn't escape, maybe she could talk her way in. "I just saw where the mistake had to be, sir. I don't know how." She blushed, deliberately, wondering if any of the other Elite had seen the mistake and been too afraid to point it out.

"And what would the next stage in your corrections be?" asked Davros.

She turned and looked at the board, part of her mind flying over the formulas. Another part of her chortled: Davros, Supreme Commander, the leader of the Elite, and she'd fallen practically into – well, into the lap he didn't have. A law unto himself. Impress him, and she could be in, right here and now. He could bend any rule regarding the treatment and employment of women, and would, if she could prove herself.

"The right answer is here," she filled in a line, "but if we change this – permission to erase, sir?"

"Granted," the scientist said, wheeling closer.

She erased the next two lines, and then replaced them with a shorter formula. Then she stepped back, beside Davros, and stared at the new results.

"I keep feeling that there is a way to make this simpler…" she mused.

There was a sudden blaze of light; she turned to see a man at the door, one hand on the light switch and one on his sidearm, reacting instinctively to the presence of a stranger, his weapon already rising to fire-

She thrust out her arms, sending her pen flying, and shouted, "Don't shoot! You'll hit Davros!"

Silence. They stared at each other.

She saw a man in the black uniform of the Elite, with the silver buckles of rank on his shoulders. He had dark hair like hers, and icy eyes behind rimless glasses. She recognised him, as Hif would have. Security Commander Nyder. No one was more loyal to Davros. And none would be more likely to be impressed with her first reaction, to protect Davros.

Nyder saw a woman, dressed in the white garb of the Scientific Corp. She was pure Kaled: dark brows, narrow blade of a nose, pale skin. But she was a woman, and she was here, in the very heart of the Bunker, standing not two feet away from the Supreme Commander! How had she got here! How had he failed!

He pointed his gun carefully and said, in a calm voice, "Move away from Davros."

She stepped around Davros, deliberately putting herself between him and the gun. She walked past, then turned her back and clasped her hands to the back of her neck. "I surrender!"

It was the scariest thing she'd had to do yet. How easy for Commander Nyder to come up behind her, put a bullet in the back of her head and end it all right here. She could hear his footsteps coming closer, closer…

"Hold, Nyder," said Davros, and the footsteps stopped.

Unseen to both of them, she smiled. The hook was set.

"Turn around," came the order, and she did, making sure to look frightened.

Davros glided a little closer to her, and Nyder took up position by the chair and a little behind. He'd holstered his sidearm, but his eyes spoke daggers.

"Who are you and how did you get in here?" asked Nyder harshly.

"Sirs." She let her eyes dart between them. "My name is Ure, and Scientist Hif brought me here."

They reacted to both the names: Ure was the name of a legendary Kaled queen, and Hif…

"I've just been informed that Hif is missing from his quarters," said Nyder flatly. One point for his side, she thought. "The security cameras can't locate him in the Bunker."

"Where is Hif?" asked Davros.

"I don't know, sir. He said he was going for food and water, but then he never came back, and…I didn't know what to do, sir. Hif told me that terrible things would happen to me if Security found me..."

Commander Nyder's eyes narrowed just a trifle.

"How did you get in here? Who authorised that you be taught to read and write?" barked Davros.

"I…I don't know sir. They never told me."

"They?"

"They tested me when I was little, and took me out of the Women's Quarters and put me in another place. Tutors came there, they taught me, but they just said I should never try to leave, that I'd be killed. They said there would be something that I was being trained for, but I don't know what."

She swallowed. "One day I got very sleepy, very dizzy after I ate. Someone came and took me away, we walked, I was blindfolded and sick, I swear I don't know how I got here! Hif said that he arranged it somehow. He kept me locked up, he said I was going to help him with his research, sir. And, and that's all," she stumbled along to silence. Inside she was well pleased: that had been a very nice little tale, tailored to its audience on the fly. And it would hopefully divert their attention to her mythical tutors, and Hif's imaginary accomplice, somewhere in the Dome.

Davros came to a decision. "Nyder. Outside." They both went to the door; the Security Commander was very careful to make sure it locked behind him.

In the empty hallway, Davros began to issue his orders. "Commander, fetch a standard prisoner restraint hood. Take her to one of the lower containment cells. She is to be confined, with no guards, and no one is to see her except you and me."

"You're going to keep her?" Nyder asked.

Davros marshalled his thoughts, and then went on. "Consider, Nyder. Here is a woman, clearly of the best Kaled breeding stock, but she is literate! More than that, she has had scientist grade training in math and mechanical sciences! It would have taken years of sophisticated teaching to bring her to her current level. That sort of effort would not be expended for one woman. There is something going on here, some conspiracy. And those conspirators will be looking for her. If they are to be my allies, my possession of her will put them in my grasp – and if they are my enemies, she gives me a tool to strike them with."

Nyder objected, "But all women are kept in the Women's Quarters. If anyone finds her, they would bring her back there – then she would be out of your control."

"True." The front of Davros' chair twitched back and forth, the equivalent of his pacing.

"Nyder, you will assign a specimen code to her. Place it where it can be seen. If she is uncovered after that, she will simply be another experimental animal. Also take a genetic sample and give it to Ronson for testing, he is most qualified. See if she has any traits that could be profitably spliced into our own experimental subjects."

When Nyder opened the door after getting the kit, he found the prisoner at the marker board (pretending that she had not been listening at the door ten seconds ago). Ure barely had time to put the pen back in its tray before the hood was on and buckled under her chin.

Nyder saluted, and left, leading Ure by one arm. Davros stared at the board.

"Two hours I looked…and she uncovered the error in less than a minute! How?"

 

* * *

 

Ure did not much appreciate the cell where the Commander left her. It was small and cold and rather stuffy, but there was water! She drank handfuls of water straight out of the tap, gulp after gulp, until she was satisfied. She hasn't realised how close to the margin Hif had come in making this body; she'd come out of the tank a bit dehydrated.

Then she sat and thought. Nyder had unhooded her before he left, so she could see. She was on the lower levels, and probably would be for a while; if she could get out of this cell, she had a chance to find her way out. Out of the Bunker, and then to hide. It would have to be in the Dome, the Wastelands outside was too dangerous. She thought that no guard waited outside her cell. But being brought here in the hood had disoriented her; was she in the north side cells, or the east? Which was which would be vital in those precious first seconds after getting through that door.

While she was thinking of that, another part of her mind was fleshing out the background history of Ure: oh, they had leaped on that old style name in a flash! She carefully went over Hif's memories, or fantasies, of how women were treated, compared to his own rigorous training and indoctrination, and came up with an interesting amalgam of them. She carefully laid the mental cues in place. Ure, Ure's, I am Ure, I have always been Ure. Details of her captivity in the Dome as well, and in the Bunker; she would have to say that she had just been brought to the Bunker, or else Nyder would really tear the place apart looking for where she had been kept. And she did not want that.

Another part of her mind was poring over Hif's opinions of the Bunker scientists, weighing them, testing them, assigning them places in her hierarchy of people who could be trusted, who could be turned, who could be deceived…and matching them against the Doctor's recorded recollections. Ronson the rebel, Gharman the hero, Kavell the honourable. And Nyder, the very definition of dishonourable.

Her mind humming on multiple tracks simultaneously, she still reacted at once when the cell door opened and Commander Nyder came in. He was pulling a small steel table behind him, with a cloth over it; there were some things under the cloth that she couldn't make out.

She decided not to jump to the conclusion that this was lunch. Instead, she stood straight and said, "Yes, sir?"

"Hands behind your back and turn around," Nyder said, and she obeyed. She felt the cold cuffs close around her wrists. He turned her around and took her by the arms, pushing her backwards. Before she could object, she was pinned in the corner of the cell, off balance, with her shoulders tight to the wall and her bare feet spread out from it. She couldn't get leverage. With slow care, he put his gloved left hand firmly over her mouth and tilted her head back, tight in the corner where the walls joined.

He flicked the cloth from the table with his other hand, and picked up some instrument that glittered. Her head was locked in his grip, and she could only roll her eyes to try and make out the thing that he was moving closer to her face. She shivered, and he felt it under his hand.

"You will not move," he said. The instrument began to whine, and a burning, prickling pain started picking at her, where its tip touched her brow. Nyder dragged the tip across her skin, and the prickling pain became stabbing, and she could feel blood start to trickle down her forehead. She closed her eyes.

"Open your eyes," he ordered, and when she hesitated, pressed the machine harder against her forehead, until she could swear it was about to chisel a hole through to her skull. Her eyes opened, and immediately started to run with tears.

He paid no attention to the tears, or so it seemed; instead he slowly drew the machine across her forehead to the temple. She whimpered.

Now the machine was back where it had started, or a little lower; and began its slicing path again. She stared into Nyder's eyes, wishing that she could see any emotional reaction in them at all. Still, his pupils were large and intent…

The second line was done; Ure could feel the blood running down into her eyebrow. One drop plinked into her eye and the salt stung; the tears that ran out of that eye were tinted red now. The machine started writing an irregular line – Letters? Numbers? - across her forehead.

It stung. It burned. It did not seem that it would ever stop: Nyder would slant the machine a degree, or put it to a different spot, and a new pain would erupt. And always her eyes were staring into those of her tormenter, close enough that she could count the individual lashes behind his glasses…

He drew a short dash, and then another, as though framing whatever he had 'written.' Then he put the machine down on the table.

Ure's relief was short lived; he picked up a swab of something soaked in astringent and cleaned her forehead. The pain was worse than the needle had been, but at least the messy blood was no longer running into her eye. He tossed the swab onto the table, and told her what was going on.

"You are Experimental Subject J29A. That is all you are, all you have ever been. If you try to speak of your past, you will be punished." He released her only to point to her forehead. "You have been marked as Bunker experimental material. If you attempt to escape, you will be punished. If you manage to escape, you will be brought back here. And punished."

She blinked; it hurt.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

"I am J29A," she whispered.

"Turn around."

She did, and felt a collector driven into the pad of her thumb; it cored out its little plug of flesh and blood and was withdrawn. Nyder laid that on the table with more care, then removed the handcuffs and, without a word, left with the table in tow.

J29A sat on the cot and stared at her hands, and the bloody puncture oozing in one.

So much for Ure.

Her options had just been severely limited.

And she wondered what he might have read in her own eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This chapter contains someone being painfully tattooed on the face against their will.


	4. Labour

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Reflectionist is asked a few questions, and given some work to do.
> 
> Content warning at the end of the chapter.

J29A made preparations before she went to sleep on the narrow bunk of her cell. She set her mind to dreaming a false past, burning the constructed memories of her life in the Dome, her abduction to the Bunker, into her mind. She self-edited her mind, writing those false memories and allowing no conflict. They would be true, because she believed them true, and because she would literally not think of the true memories. A carefully chosen sequence of thoughts was both lock and key on that part of her mind. She was certain that she would be questioned. One slip, one mistake, and the questions would continue until there was nothing left of her.

She was awakened by someone grabbing her foot; she squealed and managed not to kick. It was Nyder, who promptly popped the same hood over her head (it could stand a laundering) and took her away. She wasn't sure what time it was, but she did not think she had got a full night's sleep.

She was walked through the corridors, the tile floor cold underfoot, and into a large room. A laboratory? Was she going to be put to work already? Excellent, excellent. She was so looking forward to meeting the rest of the Elite, working with them, winning them over, and winning.

Instead she was seated in a cold chair. Cuffs bound her to it at wrists and ankles. The hood was pulled off, and replaced by a metal cap placed over her head; other metal brackets bound her at knees and chest. Now she could see the equipment lining the walls, Davros waiting behind an elaborate desk/computer terminal, Nyder's hands making some adjustments to the equipment around her own head. She hoped that the machine would not detect the metal of her neural contacts. What could she say they were, decoration?

The front of her mind was a bubbling fountain of curiosity: behind those thoughts, in another part of her mind kept hidden from the whole, she was having a very bad feeling about this. She, that is Ure who was now J29A, would not recognise this equipment, but Hif's memories certainly did. This was not a laboratory. This was the Interrogation Centre.

After Nyder was done, he stepped back, out of her line of sight.

Davros spoke, and her eyes immediately jumped to him. "Experimental subject J29A. The machinery to which you are attached," he said, "is to measure your intelligence. I will ask you a series of questions, and you will answer them as completely as you are able."

"Yes, sir," she said. She was certain that this was actually a lie detector. Now she would find out if her mental sculpting had held true.

The first questions were simple: today's date, the square root of pi, what her last meal had been (a pity they hadn't asked when her last meal had been, she was ravenous). Since no alarums went off when she described the meal, the fake memories she had built had successfully deceived Davros' equipment. Everything that Hif knew she had shared, examined, cross-filed and back-referenced. So when Davros' questions got longer and more specifically scientific, it was no problem to define Prem's axioms, or discourse on cytology, vehicle dynamics, biochemistry. Her main worry was one-upping her questioner. She imagined that Davros would be digging for information on the 'tutors' that had educated her so well (and probably furious that those tutors were not working to train HIS scientists), and in her anticipation she overlooked the importance of one of the questions.

"And where is Hif?" Davros asked.

"I don't knooAAAAAAA!" She screamed in agony as pain hammered into her from nowhere.

When the pain ended as shockingly as it had begun, J29A slumped, and whispered, "…know?" She rolled her eyes to her right, and saw Nyder lowering a flexprod which he had driven into her shoulder. Hif knew that thing, it sent out a pressure wave that rolled through flesh, bruising and crushing as it went. At the higher settings it could be as damaging as a bullet wound, without leaving inconvenient holes that prisoners would bleed out through. Applied to her arm, it would be only be agony; if he touched it to her torso, he could crush internal organs, literally break her heart. The two little contacts sticking out of the end of it looked like fangs, like the sharp eyes of Death as they shone.

"Hif is the man who brought you here, who abandoned you," said Davros, persuasively. "I do not mean him any harm, I only want to ask him some questions. I need his help, to understand why he brought you here. What he was working on. And where he got you from." Davros' voice grew rougher and more mechanical with every word.

"Now. Where is Hif?" he said, and she saw Nyder tense, raising the prod a little.

She started to hyperventilate, gasping in self-induced fear; his machines would tell him if she faked terror. "I don't know, I don't know!" she half-screamed - and she did not know, truly; the memories were closed off to her. "What does this have to do with an intelligence test?"

"It is to see if you are intelligent enough to obey orders."

"What are your orders, Davros?" she said desperately. "I will obey!"

"You will tell me where Hif is. Now."

"I don't know, really, I'm telling the truth, I donnnnn-" She clenched her teeth on her scream, but it was too great and she let it out, howling until her lungs felt like they were about to crack. Finally Davros signalled Nyder to stop, and she fell back in her bonds, limp. She sucked in as much air as she could, and gave a quick retracing of her path through the Bunker, from the storeroom in Section C where Hif had "left" her (and which, by no coincidence, was quite far away from the room where Hif had actually made her), to the laboratory where Davros had found her. Then she lay still and shivered. "That's where I saw him last, that's all I know," she whispered, and waited to see if her memories would read true.

"If that is all you know, that your usefulness is limited. While there may be some novelty value in having a freak female who can read and write and do simple sums, I fail to see how your presence in the Bunker can aid me. I have the Elite." Davros wheeled away from the desk and moved close to J29A, close enough to watch her cringe away from him. "Perhaps I could just leave you here. With Nyder."

With great effort, she kept her eyes on Davros' ruin of a face. They believed her, but it was not enough. Davros was deliberately ignoring everything she had said, rejecting the evidence that she was trained as well as one of the Elite: she didn't know where Hif was, therefore, she was worthless. That was par for the course for Davros: he believed in something and it was real, or he did not and he rejected its reality.

How to prove her value to him? She didn't dare bargain with any of Hif's knowledge, there was no way to explain how she knew it. And besides, it was data that Davros repudiated. Her mind flashed on the alien information she bore - and stepped away from it. Again, how could she explain? But there was one thing she could explain, one thing that they both knew to be true.

"I saw the error on the board," she said, her voice wavering but still emphasising the 'I'. "I saw it, I marked it as wrong, which none of your Elite would. How many of the Elite had written on that board-"

The flexprod came into her line of vision, stretching towards the large muscle of her thigh. A hit there could tear the flesh from her bones, cripple her. She ignored it.

"-ten, fifteen? How many do you think saw it?"

The flexprod touched her, Nyder's finger was on the trigger button.

She leaned forward the fraction she could in her bonds, and whispered, "How many saw your error, Davros, and did not dare to correct it?"

The silence after that question hung between them.

"Nyder," said Davros, "take her back to her cell." He turned away, paying no attention as Nyder freed the sweat-soaked woman (carefully, in stages, deploying several pairs of cuffs so that she was never completely unbound), and then hooded her and took her away.

 

* * *

 

Several duty cycles later, Nyder opened the door to J29A's cell, and without preamble handed her a folder. "Davros wants your evaluation of this." His tone was faintly sarcastic; clearly he thought the contents of the folder would be quite beyond her.

She had been expecting more questioning about her own past, and about Hif. Had they given up the search for him? Was the secret laboratory found? (She had regained her suppressed memories by recalling in sequence the smell of strawberries, the exact mass of Jupiter, and the sound of a gecko skittering over a wet window - and almost wished she could lock them back away, because they gave her something more to fret over). Not showing her anxiety, J29A opened the folder and read its contents, fast, taking only a few seconds per page. She spent almost an entire minute evaluating the charts that formed the last three pages, then she looked up at Nyder.

"Are you prepared to take dictation?" she said mildly. Nyder stiffened, and handed her a pen. Narrowly, he watched her as she flipped over the last page, and neatly printed out several sentences of text. Watching a woman write was rather bizarre, but then again, so was having a woman in the Bunker.

She handed the pen back to Nyder, then closed the folder and returned it as well. Without a further word, he turned on his heel and left. Out in the cellblock corridor, he stood and read what she had written.

The note read, 'It is my opinion that handing someone a folder of genetic blueprints without sufficient backup materials or contextual references is an exercise in futility.

'That being noted, there is something wrong with the replication of Chart 2 of Section 5 - either on the printout itself, or in the genes being charted.' Nyder flipped back in the report to that chart, but could not see the error. Either she was wrong, or it was outside his understanding.

He flipped back to J29A's notes and read the last sentence.

'I do not know if Commander Nyder is edible, but if someone fails to bring me food soon, I will be tempted to find out.' She had written that right under Nyder's nose, listening to her own stomach growl as she did so.

That insolent -! He was tempted to return to the cell and administer an appropriate punishment, but Davros had not yet seen this report. Afterwards, then.

"Why has J29A not been fed?" was Davros' first statement after reading the report's new addendums.

"She can hardly be integrated into the usual feeding schedule," Nyder pointed out. "I had been waiting to consult with you on the matter." Somehow the consultation had always fallen off his schedule.

"Commander Nyder. You will not take out your hostilities towards Scientist Hif on an experimental animal."

"I understand, sir," said Nyder. And Davros was right of course; he had been keenly humiliated by Hif's bringing this woman here, sliding her past all of the Bunker's security procedures by methods unknown. He still had not found how Hif had managed it.

"The equipment confirmed she was telling the truth, she does not know where Hif is." Davros' voice was dismissing. "And you have found no trace of him."

"None, Davros. But if he could get J29A in, perhaps he could get out," suggested Nyder.

"Then he must be found and silenced." Davros' current research was not for public consumption; indeed, if it was discovered and its implications fully understood, it would be the end of everything. "You will contact your spies. We need to find who in the Dome was helping Hif, how he found out about this woman. If they could hide her, they could hide him as well. For J29A, a case of emergency rations should do nicely. And make sure the water tap is unlimited," Davros ordered. Later in the day Nyder would deliver, not a case, but a thin plastic bag of ration packets - enough to hold her a month. He was careful to take the bag back with him, though. He did not want her committing suicide.

 

* * *

 

Ronson was an Elite Senior Researcher, white-haired and cautious about his position among the Elite. He could be arrogant, but absolutely cringed from the sight of anyone in a black Security uniform. Which was exactly the way that Security, and its Commander, liked him. However, he was truly gifted in genetics, and the logical choice to test the little bit of flesh cut out of J29A.

Instead of Nyder having to go to Ronson to get the results of the genetic test, Ronson actually tracked him down.

"Where did you get this sample?" the scientist asked.

"That's not important. You have the results?" Nyder took the readout out of the scientist's hands and examined it.

Ronson persisted, "But it is important! That sample is the purest example of the Kaled genotype I've ever seen! No flaws, no genetic diseases, not even any negative recessives! If I didn't know better, I'd say that sample was from a museum."

"The source is unimportant. Davros is only interested in dominant gene traits that might be of use in his own research." Nyder took the report and left, leaving Ronson with a mystery. How had any strain of the Kaled race lived, with the hundreds of years of exposure to radiation and toxins, and remained untouched? The tissue sample was fresh, some of the blood cells in it still alive. The person it was taken from, a woman yet according to the chromosome count - where was she?

Ronson considered the sample again. It had shown no signs of refrigeration when he fine-sliced it for analysis. Which meant that the source of the sample might be in the Bunker itself. Somewhere. And a name came into his mind just then. Hif.

Hif was missing. No explanation, nothing: he just hadn't shown up for work. That was the way it usually went, and everyone suspected that the brief follow-up memos that reported such missing scientists as being 'assigned to the Dome' or 'transferred for medical treatment' or 'incapacitated by laboratory accident' really meant that Davros had no further use for that man, and had removed him. Permanently.

Hif had been interested in cellular replication, specifically ways of forcing organised growth to accelerate, at close to the Tritten limit. It was not a process that Davros endorsed: he wanted his creations to progress in a simulation of the natural environment - or rather, the unnatural poison- and radiation-soaked environment of Skaro that waited outside the Bunker and the Dome. Could Hif have made some test, some prototype? And had Davros found it?

Ronson the timid went back to his work, but inside he was thinking, as hard as he could, of Hif. Where he was most often seen in the Bunker, when he was impossible to get a hold of. Where he might have been hiding something. Or someone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This chapter features someone being tortured via electrical shock.


	5. Whetted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The work continues.

Davros' plans for J29A were simple: a double check, a cross-reference on the work of his scientists. They were the finest minds of this generation, but he had chosen them for obedience, conformity, following the paths that their superiors gave them to follow. They sometimes were overly cautious when it came to correcting their work. This oddity down in her cell was a useful tool to comb through their papers. In his mind of course she addressed only the errors of his subordinates, and not his own.

J29A's plans for Davros were more complex: to work superbly, so superbly as to win him over, to get him to let her out. It was a part of the plan, a part of the contract even. There was a duplicate body growing in a hidden tank, and she pined to look at it, to even begin to transfer her memories to it now. But she dared not reveal anything of this to Davros; he would certainly seize the new body for dissection. And if he figured out that she was actually an alien, he would kill her out of hand.

Every day was the same. She would wake up, eat, and then start skimming through the reports after Nyder delivered them; looking for errors, for misstatements, for duplicated efforts. Again and again she would see tiny flaws, room for improvements and simplification. Some of these were even flaws in Davros' own work, that others had transcribed without daring to correct them; she was the one who could correct even Davros, because she had no status, no rank. She was just a laboratory animal.

Sometimes at night, Nyder would lead her hooded to an empty lab, where Davros would meet with her and they would review some formula or strategy. She would stand at the board, writing down formulas as fast as Davros could fire them out, and then evaluate and update them on the fly. Davros was always bitter and sarcastic, ready to verbally flay her for the slightest flaw. An armed Nyder would stand guard during these meetings; J29A disliked that, because she felt jealousy in the way that he looked at her. Jealous that Davros' attention was on someone besides him? She wondered what Nyder would do to her, if she were no longer under Davros' protection.

But she loved this work. Davros' mind was a miracle, it was an honour to stand beside him and work with him. Through the reports she reviewed and the formulas she wrote, she built up a fantastically detailed view of Davros' vision for the ultimate weapon of war, the ultimate salvation of his race. The Mark Three travel machines, someday to be dubbed the Daleks. She learned their mechanical components, their genes - but not them. The mutants that would be inside those travel machines were kept sealed away in their poison-soaked, irradiated incubator chamber. She had no contact with the creatures, only with their creator.

At one point she was ordered to calculate the rate at which radiation would penetrate the Kaled Dome over the next decade; she was delighted to soak in these figures, and plan exactly where she could set up her own laboratory in the Dome's vacant industrial zones without fear of being discovered. There were places that had been proactively abandoned, probably still chock-full of equipment waiting to be repurposed.

It seemed that she might be kept here, working as Davros' secret fact-checker, until the war ended. And somehow, 'all prisoners freed' did not sound like what Davros would do on that happy day; more like 'all prisoners down the disposal chute.'

She reviewed Nyder's movements when he stepped into and out of the cell, calculating how to get around his perpetually drawn gun. She methodically worked at Davros' good graces. She exercised, stressing her frame at odd angles, practicing the moves of fighting arts that had never been seen on Skaro. She ran scenarios in her head, again and again and again, in waking and in the endless slow crawl of sleep. Where she would run, where she could hide, how long the memory transfer would take, how long to escape.

They would not be sending her back to the Dome now, not with this mark on her forehead. She touched it, feeling the faint ridge under her skin; when she had finally managed to snatch a glimpse in a mirror, she thought the tattoo rather attractive. But it marked her as Bunker property – unless she wore a headband. Or cut her hair into bangs.

Nobody had disturbed her hair yet; she made sure that she tied it in a knot before Nyder stuffed her head into the hood, lest he be tempted to start pulling it. So far the implants had gone unnoticed.

And she counted the days, until the new body would be ready.

 

* * *

 

It was probably inevitable that someone would notice that the Commander was going down to the lower levels on a regular basis. And that there was, in theory, nobody down there currently to visit or guard.

It was Lonrie, one of the guards, who was bold enough to go down and see what Nyder was up to. Unfortunately for him, rather than follow Nyder, he just went and started poking around; doubly unfortunately, Nyder was actually following him.

Lonrie went to the cell he thought the Commander was visiting, punched in the master security override code, the door opened – and he was met by a heel in the pit of his stomach that doubled him over, and a blow to the head that sent him to the floor, unconscious.

J29A stepped over his body – and was face to face with Nyder.

"Going somewhere?" he enquired.

He held his life in his teeth at that moment, though he did not know it; if he had been half a pace closer, if it had not been only sixteen days, he might have died before he could take another breath. Damn the contract, damn all necessity, damn all projections that said Nyder had to live, she wanted to get OUT!

Instead she stepped back, and shoved the unconscious Lonrie out of the path of the door with her foot.

"Just clearing the door," she said, as it closed between them.

Nyder irritatedly keyed the door open; J29A was still standing just inside of it.

"I don't believe he saw my face, sir." She waited, hands folded in front of her. Nyder looked down at the body of his unconscious guard, then up at her.

"And what do you suggest be done with him?" he asked, with a faint emphasis on the word 'you'.

She thought, and gave him a serious answer. "Put him through full decontamination treatment – don't tell him anything, just flush him clean, inside and out. That should keep anyone from trying the same."

Lonrie groaned at their feet; J29A covered her mouth, to indicate her silence, and Nyder closed the door between them.

"The medical section, for full decontamination. Now!" Nyder made certain that he did not touch his wounded man as he stumbled his way to the elevators.

* * *

 

Ronson had always believed in getting his work assignments, getting them done, and then getting away. Hiding away in his quarters, staying safe. It was the best way to survive here.

But he wanted to find where Hif had been doing his genetics work - and he must have been doing it. It wasn't like Hif to give anything up: he remembered keenly an argument over a burner stand that had nearly come to blows. Even if Davros had ordered him to stop, Hif would have found a way to go on.

Ronson had reviewed the laboratory experiments in progress - everything that had been touched or labelled by Hif had been stripped out, probably by Nyder. But to search the Bunker wasn't easy. Everyone was supposed to be on work, on shift, at all times - or locked in their quarters. However, Ronson found a way.

He made up a project preliminary draft, saying that he wanted to analyse how the mutant Kaleds would be affected by long-term immersion in a non-radioactive environment - say, something like the Bunker corridors. It was sent to Davros, and came back with his approval. With a portable radiation detector and a clipboard, he went all over the Bunker, taking readings and noting them down, saying "Hrm," at appropriate intervals.

He was gathering valid data, oh yes! But he was also looking for signs of Hif.

If any Security men stopped him, he would slowly scan them with the radiation detector, make a few notes, then narrow his eyes and ask them leading questions about volunteering for his 'project.' They declined, of course. There were very unpleasant rumours about the mutants that Davros was working with - almost as bad as the reality.

After a day or so of that, Ronson found himself left quite blissfully alone by Security as he puttered about. And it was during his puttering that he found the folder.

It was just the finest edge of paper showing around the metal bordering a ventilation grille, but Ronson's eyes saw it and Security had not, and it was out of the duct and in his clipboard before the next patrol came by. Later, back in his quarters, he read it closely. He was going to have to memorise it, it was much too dangerous to keep here.

Because it was a hand-drawn diagram of the ventilation system, annotated in Hif's neat blocky handwriting, showing plainly that there were passages large enough for a person to escape. Escape from the Bunker! Of course!

Please let Hif have gone to the Dome, Ronson said to himself. Let him go there and expose this monstrosity that the Elite are creating to the Kaled politicians, the men who can stop this! The Mark Three travel machines, and the monsters that Davros was creating to put inside of them. There was no love lost between Davros and Hif; surely he would reveal the truth.

If Hif made it to the Dome. If he wasn't eaten by the creatures in the cave systems (Davros' experimental leftovers), or shot by soldiers from either side, or clubbed to death by the Mutos. Or if he hadn't just been killed in his sleep by Nyder, and hauled away for disposal.

If only Hif had talked to him! He could have given the other scientist names, people he could contact, information that would get him into the highest circles of Kaled political power. Alone in his quarters, Ronson closed his eyes, and dropped his chin against his chest. But why would Hif have done that? In his eyes, Ronson was probably just another one of the Elite who served and never questioned.

He was done with Hif's notes now, and he put them under his pillow. He was going to have to go to the incinerator tomorrow morning, and destroy them.

Ronson did not think that he could escape. He was old and afraid, too afraid of the risks. And he still hadn't found any sign of Hif's hidden experiment. Davros must have it. Her. Davros had a tissue sample, from a live subject: therefore, Davros had the results of Hif's experiment. She wasn't in any of the laboratory spaces; therefore, she was in the cells on the lower level. Tomorrow, he thought eagerly. Tomorrow, he would go down there and see for himself.

 

* * *

 

J29A woke up as Commander Nyder dropped a second batch of reports to be processed on the cot beside her. She stared at the cell door for a long time after he had disappeared through it. She must have fallen asleep after her midday meal, so tired that his entrance hadn't awakened her. Which was not supposed to happen.

She was starting to wear out. She couldn't keep going like this. Not when there was only one of her. All her assumptions on what to do after landing involved influencing groups of people, not an obsessed workaholic who would drive her to her limits, and over them. She was getting little sleep, and thought that the emergency rations might have deteriorated too much to be nutritious (the packets were awfully dusty). She was coming no closer to fulfilling her contract: Davros still didn't trust her, or think of her as anything more than a novelty. He wasn't giving her so much as a finger width of influence. What was wrong with the man, she wondered irritably to herself. Has he never met an intelligent woman in his life?

Seduction was not only a skill but also an art that she had studied in depth…but no; Nyder would never open that narrow heart of his to anyone who might jeopardise his position at Davros' side. There were no male/female relationship patterns among the Kaleds, no regular contact between them. And if the men were this traumatised and emotionally stunted, she hated to think what the women must be like.

The time was close. Her other self was almost ready. If she could escape even for an hour, everything could be saved.


	6. The End of the Experiment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ... and then there were two.  
> Content warnings at the end.

Davros, Supreme Commander of the Elite and the Kaled people, was not the most introspective of personalities. He did not scrutinise his own motives: they were his, and that was quite sufficient. He did not know, or more specifically did not want to know, why something compelled him to drive this woman he had found, this J29A, to her absolute limits. Working her all day on the reports, and all night on his formulas. Endlessly criticising, upbraiding, needling, correcting, and harassing her. Until she tired, until she started to make mistakes. Until she failed.

Davros would not tire: in his current condition, he barely needed sleep. He could keep going, he could defeat her. He would defeat her. Or rather - use her up. And once she had failed, once he had got everything he needed out of her, it was only logical that she should be put aside. Disposed of.

 

* * *

 

Davros had been getting more and more irritable with J29A, and one evening it came to a head.

Exhaustion was a heavy weight lying across her shoulders, digging into her, but still she kept up on the board with Davros, writing his formulas, doubling back and correcting, editing and underlining, again and again, until he snapped, "Enough! It is useless to go on."

She stopped, and stepped bleary-eyed back from the board to let Davros see what she had written. She glanced at Nyder. No help there.

Davros swivelled, nearly running over J29A's toes.

"What makes you think that I need you to correct my work?" he rasped, his mechanical voice growing louder and harsher. "You were brought here to betray me! To humiliate me! This is all some trick of the Kaled government, or even the Thals!"

J29A held out her hands in a pleading way. "Sir, I am here to help…"

"Nyder! Take her away. This experiment is over." Davros turned his chair, not even deigning to watch as Nyder hooded J29A and led her out.

When they got back to her cell, Nyder followed her in and closed the door; he undid the hood, but not the handcuffs. He stood behind her, silently, for a long and awful moment. Then he dropped the hood on the cot, and turned her around.

His voice was as mild and passionless as ever as he ordered, "You will kneel to me…and now."

She stared into his eyes, her chin just starting to quiver, and then she sank to her knees. Nyder looked down at her, put his hand on top of her head, felt a hint of her warm breath through his uniform and moved his gloved fingers in her hair.

And saw the glint of metal.

He threw her to the cot; ignoring her gasps, he pinned her head and raked through her hair, finding the series of metal contacts grown into her scalp. He stood her up – and then bounced her head off the wall hard enough that her vision blurred with the pain. While she was trying to recover, he retrieved the hood and pulled it over her head: he also drew his handgun and thrust it into her side.

Without another word to her - why bother speaking to a dead woman? - Nyder marched her outside.

 

* * *

 

Captain Tane protested when the Security Commander ordered him to clear the Bunker entrance checkpoint. "But sir, it's never left unmanned!"

Nyder's voice was clear out of the communicator. "I will be in there as soon as your men are clear, so the station will not be vacant. Now carry out your orders."

Tane and the guards left; as soon as they were out, Nyder entered, dragging J29A with him. She stumbled; Nyder had been spinning her round and round on her feet as they waited outside, to keep her off-balance. She hoped she wasn't going to be sick in the hood.

She had overestimated Nyder's emotional control. He'd panicked, when he saw the metal in her head: his panic could be lethal.

She felt his hands shove her into something – a doorway? A blow to her chest as though to remind her to keep still. Then his footsteps moving away, and –

PAIN. A terrible shrieking pain, all through her head and her bones – some sort of scan, the security scanner in the checkpoint! But it felt like it was setting every metal fibre in her head on fire. Possibly even fusing them, burning out her neurons. Brain damage was the thing in all the worlds that she feared most. To be crippled, incomplete, never to share her Reflection, never rejoin with her Hive.

The machine stopped, and she staggered forward and fell to her knees, gasping. She could hear Nyder picking up something from the machine, then coming closer and grasping her shoulder…and if he had the machine readout in one hand and her shoulder in the other, then his gun had to be in its holster…

She somersaulted forward and through her own handcuffed hands in a manoeuvre that would have dislocated both shoulders if she'd faltered. Before Nyder could react, she had her hands on the floor in front of her, and kicked with both feet backwards. Her heels met Nyder's chest and he was knocked off his feet. She jumped and twisted and leapt towards him, and kicked, aiming above and to the right of the sound of his gasped curse. And missed; but she felt her bare toes brush Nyder's head, and could kick again, more accurately, and take him down.

It took time to claw off the hood (which he fortunately had not bothered to lock on with the attached strap), get the key to free her hands, and finally take Nyder's gun. She stared down at him, one finger touching the trigger and then drawing back. Absent-mindedly she picked up the machine readout with one foot and transferred it to her free hand.

Nasty fellow. Necessary, but nasty. Anyway, there was nothing to be gained by killing him, and his death might impede the future completion of the contract.

So.

She purged the security scanner's too-revealing records by the subtle method of unfastening the power cable. Nyder must have wanted a readout on the implants to bring to Davros; he was probably afraid that she had a bomb in her head. Using the security scanner, he could get very specific information without involving any of the Elite.

With a sudden giggle, she lunged for Nyder and took off his boots. She could make good use of them.

Now then. Destroying this security console would do nothing but set off a dozen alarums, but she could set the thing to do a random cycling of all cameras, with the intervals between the switch from one view to the next being measured in milliseconds. That should make a useless hash of the video feeds! Again she thanked Hif, for his thorough deconstruction of the Bunker systems. She hit three buttons, held a fourth down, disabled the intercom and did something really improper to the door controls with Tane's pen. Then she slipped through the armoured inner doors as they closed and sealed – locking the unconscious Nyder in the checkpoint.

Swiftly and silently, she scuttled down and to the left, away from the laboratories and computer rooms. Away from Tane and his crew, waiting for Nyder's orders in the Duty Transition room; she hoped they would wait a good long time, like an hour or two, before checking up on the Commander.

* * *

 

J29A crawled into Hif's hidden laboratory space - literally. There was a power duct which Hif had mapped, and she had gone down to the lower level (the caves were tantalisingly close, but she ignored them), slipped into the duct next to the heavy bundles of cable, and then climbed up and through an access door. Hif had not been able to do this because of his size, and even she had a tight squeeze here and there. But now she was in. She placed Nyder's boots at her side. In the dim light, she knelt and stared, hard. Comparing this room, and all its contents, to the memory of it she had burned into her mind before her flight.

It was all the same. Nothing had been moved, nothing had changed. If Security had looked through here, they had taken nothing. She went to the long metal tank, touched it and felt a faint warmth. Tapped it, and felt no heavy weight of liquid inside. Smiled, wide, baring all her teeth.

She reconnected the control panel and saw that yes, she was alive! Her sister lived! The nutrient fluid rendered down from Hif had been transformed, used to feed that tiny blot of cells from J29A and grow it to full adult form. And the second part was also complete: the neural array had formed itself through the new one's growing brain, like a thousand strands of invisibly thin wire, leading to the cables that connected to the amplifier.

Slowly, J29A started the neural amplifier. She put Hif's metal cap of connectors on her own head - and then reversed it - and finally, by dint of putting it on sideways and squishing it down with both hands, managed to get it to connect with enough of her implants at once. Inside her heart was happiness, joy like childbirth, like sunlight after darkness, like water in the desert. It would work, it was going to work! They would be two, not one! She would not be alone! They would be two, then many, but always joined as one! This was the beginning.

She drew a deep breath, and began to pour herself out, through the amplifier, into the new body. But she was not actually moving herself: she was moving a copy of herself, built upon the strong foundation of Reflectionist thought and topped off with the Crowns of specialised knowledge.

She could feel the oceans of knowledge inside her head churning under the influence of the amplifier: yes it was crude, yes it was only tested once, but yes, yes it worked! Already she could feel a self, an ego in the brain connected to hers. She could see into the new mind, see the great arching bridges and sweet depths of it, feel the same urges, the same knowledge in both their minds. She stood there immobile for five minutes, ten, twenty. More and more data was moved, crosschecked, duplicated. Soon, soon, the transfer would be complete-

From the intercom system outside came a voice, Nyder's voice saying, "This is a Security drill. All Elite are to remain in their quarters-"

And then the power went out. In the blackness, J29A screamed, silently. Standard security procedure of course - to shut down everything non-essential, to seal all the scientists in their rooms. But she had not thought that the procedure would also cut off Hif's secret power connections. Once those secretly created connections were purged from the system by the shutdown, they would not rebuild. Without power, she could not complete the duplication! Her hands scrabbled furiously over the amplifier, but it was no use. There was nothing she could do. Nyder's voice kept speaking in the background, but the sudden rushing pain in her head was too great to let her understand his words.

She had failed, she thought to herself, her face clutching in agony. She should not have made a second body now. She should have stayed here, disassembled the equipment, and fled to the Dome. But she had been so fascinated by Davros, so mesmerised by the possibility of directly serving him, that she set herself up to fail in leaving, to stay in the Bunker.

But she had to stay! They would never have accepted a female in the Dome-

Her knees suddenly weakened, and she fell, realising the last level of her failure.

In the Dome, all women were kept in the Women's Quarters, isolated. Nobody would assume that a random soldier walking around was female. If she had put on a uniform and cropped her hair to military length, she could have got into the Dome, found a place to hide and to work. She was a fool, a fool, a blind self-centred inflexible fool!

A fool who did not consider the ramifications of Kaled society enough. A fool who did not study Hif's memories of emergency drills enough. Again and again she had run her scenarios, and each time she missed these facts, the possibility of losing power in Hif's laboratory space, the concept that women are never seen here, the crippling flaws in every plan, the failure on the board right in front of her. She had failed, and failed twice over, because she had failed not only herself but also her sister. She had failed her contract.

She roughly pried the sealed tank open, reached inside and drew her sister into a sitting position. Pressing their heads together, metal contact to metal contact, she fought to download all that she could out of her mind, and into the new mind. It would not be enough, it could never be enough. You could send thoughts, even conversations, but as to moving the great masses of data - it would take days using this method. Days they did not have. The searchers were coming. Davros, Nyder, whoever had powered down the Bunker - they had defeated her, not knowing it.

She pulled her head away for a moment. In the dark, she touched the other woman's mouth.

"Can you understand me?" J29A whispered, in English. Terror held her tight; if the transfer was so incomplete that the new self did not have language, everything had truly been lost.

In Kaled, the new woman answered, "The amiloo rolled down and ruptured its larynx." And giggled; she felt the smile and the giggle under her fingers.

"Sister!" they said as one, and clenched hands. And pressed their heads together, side to side, to lock their minds together just as tightly through their implants.

~I don't have everything, the Reflection is incomplete!~ the new Reflectionist wailed internally, mind to mind. ~You can't leave me like this! I'm not - I'm not finished!~ They could both feel the raw edges in her mind, the attenuations where complete sets of data were incomplete or frayed. The Crowns were not whole, not all of them: and every missed bit of data was like a vinegar-tipped needle in the eye. It was a pain unlike any other.

~I am sorry, my sister~, thought J29A. ~I have given you everything that I can. You have the contract. Now I must give Security someone to catch. You will live. You will live, and with enough skills and talents to go on. Our Reflection may dim, but you shall make it bright again! Bright enough to reach our HiveHome, to fulfill the contract, to reach our Source!~

~You can't leave! Power, get more power! We can still complete!~

J29A's eyes watered in pain. ~The only batteries here powerful enough are power back-ups larger than we are. There is no time to move them, we can't get to them, and no smaller battery can power the memory amplifier.~

~You can't do this to me! It's not fair!~ the new one wailed, like a child, a child only minutes old and already knowing that she was facing a cold, unfriendly world.

~It is not fair. It just is. If you stay here with me they will take us both, and strip us down to the last neurons. If I escape with you, Davros will order the military after us, and we will both be gunned down outside. Take what you have been given, and live.~

There was a silence between them. Then the new Reflectionist said aloud, "I will live." The words were bitter in her mouth.

J29A touched the new one's cheek in the dark. Drew her hand to her own cheek, let her feel the tears that streamed down it. Aloud, she whispered hesitantly, "May I name you?"

The other's answering whisper sounded shocked. "Of course! Better you than them!"

"Hopefully they will never catch you to name you. Well. I named myself Ure, and they took that name. How about - Ture?"

"Ture. Two-Ure. Oh, that's an awful pun," Ture groaned.

"Yes, but a pun in English - if anyone recognises it, well, they'll have more to explain than is convenient."

They stood together, and Ture stepped out of the tank. With solemn care, J29A fetched the boots for Ture and helped her put them on; they were just the thing for moving around the metal-strewn poisoned landscape outside the Bunker. But when J29A took a step back, Ture grabbed her hands, desperately. "Don't leave so soon."

"Do you know the way out of the Bunker?"

"Yes…yes, I do. The power duct, then through the caves, and out to the Dome." Her hot hands squeezed tight on J29A's cold ones. "But it shouldn't be you to die, it should be me! You are the First here, you have the full knowledge, you can't die!"

J29A touched her own forehead. "It has to be me. We could never duplicate these marks in time." Even if they could apply a tattoo, it would be fresh and bleeding; and they both knew that whichever one of them remained would be subject to the most stringent examination. "I have to distract them, to give you time to escape. When they catch me, they might keep me alive." Might, being the operative word. "Besides, there's always the chance I'll get to lay Nyder out on his ass. Again."

They both heard the searchers approaching.

J29A kissed her sister goodbye, and pressed Nyder's weapon into her hand. Ture wept, silently, as J29A slipped out the door, and together they pushed it shut between them. She still wept, as she went to disassemble the equipment and prepare it for transport.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brief mention of coercive sex.


	7. Escape!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's more than one way to escape.
> 
> Content warning at the end of the chapter.

Outside, the corridors were lit only by dim blue emergency lighting. Battery-powered, of course; useless for the amplifier. J29A heard booted footsteps moving away from her. Security. She needed to draw their attention away from the 'empty' laboratory, so she moved silently in the opposite direction.

She wanted to tie up Security for as long as possible in other parts of the Bunker, so that Ture would have time to break down the equipment. And if she could just tap into the computer, she thought she could make things even hairier for them.

J29A drew on Hif's memories, and dodged in and out of several rooms in a pattern that no intruder would know. Once she was in position, she rolled glassware down corridors to send the patrols scampering after them. She took the liberty of lowering a few safety doors as well, using the manual cranks. After she had the guards chasing each other and trying to work their way around her obstructions, she made her way to the furthest laboratory. Hif had known a clever trick for popping a door's control panel open using the edge of a washer, and she did so. Inside, she used that same washer to remove the cover from one of the computer terminals, and threaded the cables through her fingers with a chuckle.

With a quick stripping of wire, the computer was soon sending and receiving information through the metal implants in J29A's brain. She folded herself against the underside of a desk, tensing against the frame: unless someone actually crawled under it and looked up, she was invisible. She clenched her dark hair in her teeth so it would not hang down and betray her, and thought. Thought hard.

The computer mainframe was still on, of course, crunching the previous day's numbers. She threaded her way into it, mind to machine, seeing if it was connected to the security system. No, unfortunately, a separate system, damn them! She couldn't override the security shutdown of the non-essential power systems, or lock the guards into one section. She could activate certain remote terminals and camouflage that they were live. She could store certain data in disused backup discs. She did both.

She found one cheering bit of information: some careless and long-dead engineer (and if he wasn't long-dead, he would be dead soon enough) had not given the security cameras their own power supply. So they were shut down too, excellent, excellent! Ture would be able to get out, without leaving any contradictory footage of two escapees loose at once.

She was ready to do one last scan of the system for anything useful. Her mental vision quickly focussed on an anomaly. There was an active set of input/output signals flickering in one section of the computer. Was Davros still awake and working? Another scientist doing secret, illicit research?

No. It was what she sought, the final goal of her contract, at last! It was the Kaled mutants; those creatures that she knew would become the Daleks! Davros' scientists had directly linked them in their incubation containers to the computer to train and condition them, and even now, in the dark of the night, they were awake - and aware. And she could touch them, with her mind.

The dialogue began, a meeting of minds profoundly alien to each other: one warm, the others cold and warped and non-humanoid to the extreme. But she shared, she offered, and they took, and ordered more. She gave them more, and they took it all. And then, when the mutants were all awake and tapping into the computer at once, she opened up a mental landscape and showed them something they had never seen, and would never see in the hollow, dust-shrouded skies of Skaro.

Stars. Stars burning in the deepness of space, in all the million colours of the night, stretching across the heavens in countless arrays, and each one a source of light, heat, power, and possibly - Life!

The mutants were stunned to numbness.

Her thoughts whispered across their auditory nerves. ~This is the Universe. Big, isn't it?~

Excited chirping and babbling demands for more information from them.

~Be strong, little ones. Grow strong and learn, become many and work as one, and someday, someday - all this will be a part of you.~

 

* * *

 

She needed to get away from this laboratory; it would be too easy to corner her in here. Worse luck, she heard another patrol coming, double-timing it. She had done perhaps too good a job of drawing their attention. These men were fanatically devoted to their duty, so there was no chance of using her feminine wiles on them. In fact, they probably wouldn't know a feminine wile if it jumped up and bit them.

If she could not escape, could she destroy herself? Davros' dissection of her neural array would be much too revealing. But maybe not. Hif had built a simple safeguard into the flowmetal to keep it from running rampant: if the internal array filaments were exposed to air, they would shrivel into nothingness - a safety feature she thoroughly approved of. She thought of Hif, fondly. She would always think of him fondly. Maybe she could risk being caught whole. There was always the chance of yet another escape. Even now.

Nyder's voice over the intercom was again intoning, "This is a Security drill..." as she turned the corner too fast - and felt the numbing blow against the back of her skull.

It seemed to take a long time to fall. She managed to curl and land on her side, then look up, past a booted foot swinging, to see Nyder's face. He'd obviously found time to get new boots.

Recording, she thought: then the kick connected and she stopped thinking.

 

* * *

 

In his quarters, Ronson was awake. His eyes were wide and dry, and his fists were clenched across his chest. He could hear the Security patrols hunting through the corridors. And every footfall might as well have been a blow against his bare heart.

He had waited too long. He was locked in here, while they hunted down Hif, or Hif's creation, or both. Whatever they were hunting, they would certainly destroy.

 

* * *

 

When J29A woke up, she was tied, well, taped to the cot in her cell. Taped wrist and ankles and across her chest, a piece over her mouth and one bight wound around her forehead and the cot itself too, so that she could not speak or turn her head.

It didn't look like there was any immediate rush to release her. In her heart, she sent best wishes to Ture, who by now would have broken down the replication equipment and neural amplifier to their minimal components, packed them up and left the Bunker through the ventilator shafts. The search would be over; Security had captured the escaped experimental subject. It was over, for her: if she died now, most of her knowledge and personality would go on in Ture. She tried to smile against the tape.

Deliberately she did not think of the possibility that Ture might have been captured or killed. Ture lives, she is alive and free, and therefore I am alive and free. We are free.

She closed her eyes and conjured up her memories of Hif; some of his last memories alive. She echoed him as she thought to herself, It was worth it.

 

* * *

 

When Nyder finally came in, he was carrying a metal bucket. She couldn't ask him questions because of the tape over her mouth; but her eyes practically screamed them. Without answering them, he sat down on the side of the cot and withdrew a plain length of rubber medical tubing from the bucket - plain, except for the ominously sharp-looking hollow metallic probe stuck in one end of it.

Without a word, without the slightest flicker of expression, Nyder took the metal probe in the fingers of his right hand and drove it through her clothes and deep into J29A's shoulder, just below the hollow of her collarbone, accurately piercing the artery leading down into the arm. She screamed at the sharp pain, but the tape silenced her. A hot stream of her blood forced its way down the probe and then came streaming out, out of the end of the rubber tube and spattering down into the bucket on the floor.

With his left hand, Nyder tore the tape from J29A's mouth; as she gasped and spat to clear her mouth, he slid his right hand down and pinched the rubber tube shut. The flood of her lifeblood stopped, cut off by the pressure of his hand.

Now his face and eyes showed something: curiosity. Fascination. How long could he keep draining her life away, drop by drop, stopping and then starting the flow? What could he make her do, in order to keep him from bleeding her to death? Would she beg? Cry? Tell him all her secrets? Not that anything she could say or do would save her. Davros wanted this specimen dead, now, and with minimal tissue damage, and this was how Nyder had decided to do it.

She stared at him, the bright red marks from the tape framing her mouth. She said very quietly, "Commander Nyder?"

He leaned forward, just a trifle.

"I'm sorry…that I kicked you in the head."

His hands didn't move: one holding up the long arch of the tube so that J29A could see it, the other hovering over her body, as though choosing where to strike next.

Even more quietly, she whispered, "I forgive you." And she smiled, a sweet and soft smile, and looked at Nyder in a way that he could not quite understand. Then she closed her eyes, and exhaled in one long breath, "I do not die, this dies."

And she did not inhale again.

He waited thirty seconds. Sixty seconds. He loosened his grip on the tube, but the blood that had streamed out with the force of a live heart behind it only dripped, and then stopped.

He pressed his ear to her chest, slammed his fist into her breastbone again and again, then urgently parted her clothes and sank his teeth into her, sharp and hard and sure to elicit a reaction from any prisoner. Surely the bite would bring her screaming back to him and his attentions. But there was no reaction.

She was gone, with a smile on her face.

His face contorted, lips white. Then he slowly withdrew the tube from her, dropped it into the bucket with a splash, checked for a heartbeat one last time, and left the cell. He had to arrange to move this specimen. He soothed himself with the thought of her being peeled apart under the scalpels and saws.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Grievous bodily harm; character death.


	8. Recreation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nyder takes out his frustrations on Ravon. This is a Gratuitous Sex Scene (GSS) and can be skipped if it's not your cup of tea.
> 
> Content warnings at the end.

General Ravon was woken from a sound sleep by hands on his shoulders, and a hard, familiar voice in his ears. "Up and against the wall, General!"

He was a great leader of the Kaled military, but now he scrambled like a child eager to obey. There was only one person who had the authority (and the pass codes) to come into his quarters off hours like this. They both knew exactly where to go, avoiding the hooks where his uniform hung. Promptly Ravon was pressed to the wall of his quarters, forehead and chest and bare knees, and the owner of the voice was close behind him. A gloved hand groped at the waistband of his sleeping shorts, and lowered them to mid-thigh with a single jerk.

Ravon shivered, and the man behind him was close enough to feel that shiver.

"Ny-" he started, and felt a hard slap on the back of his neck.

"You will address me as Commander," Nyder ordered.

"Commander," Ravon said. Then his voice locked up, and he couldn't go on. He coughed, and whispered, "How may I please you?"

Nyder's reply was his bared fingers, probing between Ravon's bottom cheeks. They found the tiny orifice there and started working at it, stretching it, opening it far enough that the fingers could enter it, stretch him from the inside. Ravon moaned, and not just at the pain.

The hand was sharply withdrawn, and he was hauled away from the wall and shoved in the direction of the bathroom. "Clean yourself out!" ordered Nyder's voice out of the dark, and Ravon went to do so, shucking off his shorts as he went.

Sitting on the toilet, his eyes wide and wet in the dim light. He'd hated having to serve his superiors while he was working his way up through the ranks. He thought that when he was General, everyone would have to serve him for a change, but no. There was always someone higher.

He turned on the tap in the tiny sink at his elbow, washed himself. His fingers went without hesitation to the little container so innocuously labelled 'cartridge grease', and then paused.

Nyder would insult him if he found him prepared; but he was fully capable of entering him anyway, raping both of them raw. The pain was as important as the pleasure to the older man, and Ravon knew it. Knew it from experience.

He opened the container one-handed, scooped up what seemed like enough, and applied it deep inside. Then, gritting his teeth, he went back into his dark quarters. Nyder's hands lit on his elbows unerringly and pushed him face-first against the wall. Could the man see in the dark? No, he'd been able to see Ravon's outline against the dim blue floorlight in the bathroom.

Both of Nyder's hands were on him now, parting his cheeks, exploring his slick passage. "Eager boy. You want it, don't you?" he said softly in Ravon's ear.

"Yes, Commander," he whispered back. And it was true. He did want it, hated it and wanted it, and stealthily he worked one of his shoulders away from the wall, gave his hand room to reach down and caress his own rapidly stiffening shaft.

He looked up to the Commander, for all his petty sniping. He was one of the Elite now, but Nyder had been a battlefield soldier just like any other man under Ravon's command. In his dreams, he and Nyder served together in the Bunker, guarded the Elite as they created more and more spectacular weapons to destroy the Thals. They fought together, worked together - and lay together. Only in his dreams.

In reality, he'd never lain beside Nyder, never even kissed him mouth to mouth. He'd knelt to him, submitted on his knees and on his feet and bent over his own desk, but never once taken Nyder in his arms. And he wanted to, he ached for it.

But he ached for this too, and this at least he would get. The stretching, the slick penetration of his own flesh. Feeling the older man moving inside of him, filling him. And starting to pump.

Ravon thrust back, impaling himself on Nyder and earning a little growl of approval from him. Good, it was so good to feel him close, feel Nyder's body against his own bare back. Smell him; hear the wet noises of his own violation. It went on, deeper and deeper and harder, faster, and then he stopped. Suddenly.

Ravon clenched himself around Nyder's invading flesh, but it was no good; Nyder was losing his erection. Ravon gritted his teeth, tried to think of what to do. If he didn't think of something, Nyder was liable to start tearing at him, strike out with hands and teeth until blood was drawn.

"Your uniform," Nyder snarled, pressing his body as close as he could.

"What?" asked Ravon, confused.

"Your uniform, put it on!" and Ravon obeyed, patting along with wall with his left hand until he encountered his dress uniform. Nyder leaned backwards, still keeping his crotch tight to Ravon's ass, letting the other man put the jacket on over his bare flesh.

He didn't give Ravon time to fasten it; in the dark, his hands started moving over the cloth, feeling the ribbons, the braid along the epaulets, and with those touches his flesh came alive again, stretched Ravon until his eyes watered with the pain.

"General, my General boy," Nyder hissed, starting to thrust again. "A General to dance on the end of my prick at my command. Dance for me, boy, move on me!"

And he did dance: balanced precariously against the wall on one shoulder and his toes, Ravon ground himself against Nyder, pumped and twisted, loving it, loving him, feeling him hot and pumping inside him, feeling his hot breath on his neck, Nyder's hands moving over his uniform and his body under it. He pictured them together, naked, filling each other, and his own hand squeezed himself to the peak. As he groaned aloud, he felt Nyder's bared teeth pressed to his neck and heat flooded into him.

In that wonderful moment of relief after their release, Ravon found that he was touching Nyder's hand. His heart was thundering, his breath was coming fast, and he was touching Nyder's hand.

Every bit of his attention was concentrated on Nyder's bare left hand, which was on Ravon's chest, under his own hand. Nyder had peeled out of his gloves to touch Ravon, touch his uniform. Unthinkingly, Ravon had clutched at it, at the peak of his passion. And now, Ravon could feel him.

Nyder's hand was wounded. Old wounds. He could feel the thick tracks of scars, the bent fingers. Ravon was terrified that if he moved, caressed Nyder's hand, Nyder would notice and draw out. Oh and please, he wanted him to stay. To stay inside him, stay with him-

Nyder withdrew, with a single smooth motion. With silent contempt he wiped himself clean on Ravon's jacket, and then fastened his own uniform and left.

Ravon went to the washroom and cleaned himself again. The soiled uniform was put aside. Then he lay on his bed, naked, curled up on his side. He wasn't quite sucking his thumb, or covering his face with his hands, but he was close to doing both.

But I did touch him, he thought to himself. I did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coercive sex, bullying and threats during sex.


	9. Dissection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As one Reflectionist prepared to build up, the other is broken down.
> 
> Content warning at the end of the chapter.

It was early in the morning, but the main laboratory was already busy. Ronson was working at his desk when Commander Nyder stopped before it.

"Yes, Commander?" he said, looking up.

Nyder's face showed no emotion as he said, "In regards to the genetic sample you were analysing earlier."

Ronson's heart gave a leap. The pure sample, Hif's sample. Was Davros finally going to reveal the source of the pure DNA to the Elite? Perhaps Hif had returned, and convinced Davros that his research was worth pursuing. Was this the new direction of the Bunker experimentation? Please, let it be true!

"There is a specimen in Dissection Room Two. You have forty minutes to open the main body and cranial cavities; after that Specialist Dannik and Davros will be doing the detailed autopsy."

Ronson rose, his mouth half open.

"Forty minutes." And Nyder left, back straight as ever.

In Dissection Room Two, the specimen was laid out under a white sheet. Ronson pulled it back, and sighed. His fingers rubbed at the weave of the sheet between his fingers hard enough to hurt, as he looked at the dreadful thing that was in front of him. This must be Hif's secret experiment, and she was dead.

The specimen was a woman: her eyes were closed and a blissful smile was frozen onto her face by death. Her features were classically Kaled, smooth and young, even beautiful. Gently, Ronson traced the specimen tattoo across her forehead. Her flesh was icy cold. Then he ran his fingers further back, into her long dark hair, and discovered the metal disks set flush with her scalp. What were they?

There was no time. The clock was already running. He put on the surgical gown and gloves, and began to cut.

Gods forgive me! he screamed inside his head, while his hands moved with expert skill to bare her secrets, open her to the eyes of whoever cared to look and prod at her. The thought that she was dead, all her children unborn with her, was heartbreaking. And she was flawless, no deformities, no trace of genetic damage.

He had finished with the torso, peeled the scalp and was almost done with the bone saw when Nyder looked in and snapped, "Aren't you ready yet?"

"Almost." Ronson did not look up when he replied, certain that Nyder would see the hatred burning in his eyes. Nyder could have assigned this chore to anyone with a decent set of hands; he'd chosen Ronson only to punish him.

"Davros will be here in four minutes." Nyder turned and left; Ronson completed his cut, levered the top of the skull off, stared inside and locked his teeth together to keep from screaming.

There were strands of metal, hundreds, maybe thousands of them, in a cloud around the inside of the skull's top. He looked down at the surface of the brain, and saw no marks there.

Ronson carefully turned over the top of the skull, examined the other side. The metal disks were there, one with a bit of scalp and hair still clinging to it. He looked at the inside again. The metal strands were gone.

Had they been there at all? Or had it been some confusion in his mind? He looked again, more closely. As well as his naked eyes could make out, there was not the slightest trace of metal protruding through the skull into the brain cavity, and no visible abnormalities of the brain tissue. The metal disks apparently served no function; he touched one, and felt it cold even through his gloved fingertip.

It was his duty to tell, to report-

No! He might not be believed. They might think that he was deluded, or that his senses were faltering. The last thing he needed at his age was a Review for Fitness to Serve; the slightest tremor of his hand, or blurring of his vision during those tests, and he would be dismissed.

He put the skullcap down beside the body, pinned back loose folds of flesh here and there with straight pins, and then, in strictly unsanitary fashion, touched his stained fingers to his own lips, and then to hers. Then he shucked off his gloves and surgical robes, mopped a stray bit of dampness from his eyes, and left.

Ronson passed Nyder in the hallway, escorting Dannik and Davros. He walked past them quickly, before they saw the tears welling in his eyes. Ronson went back to his desk, and sat, and shook. What had they done!

And what had he done, what was he doing! Those metal wires had been there. And then they'd been gone. He had to tell Davros, he was sworn to do so. But he would not. He knew that he would not.

It was his first real rebellion against Davros. It would not be his last.

 

* * *

 

Dannik had just concluded one of the most unpleasant dissections of his life.

He had faltered when Davros had shown him the body of what was obviously a perfectly normal - indeed, perfect - Kaled female, and heard him sneeringly dismiss it as a Thal Muto. Davros had wanted to specifically investigate the anatomical variations that would prove that this specimen's origins were Thal.

As any scientist knew, the differences between the Kaleds and the Thals were so slight - slightly heavier brow ridges on one side, slightly longer thumbs on the other - that they might well be normal genetic variances, enhanced by the isolation of the two groups. Indeed, any honest man would have to admit that the Kaleds and the Thals, from an anatomical point of view, were well within the variances to make them the same species.

Honesty was not a quality valued in situations like this though. Dannik kept his silence, and cut where he was told.

It was the cutting that made it worse. Mutilation, really. Davros showed almost no interest in the skull and brain, even with the interesting inlays in the skullcap: Dannik was completely intrigued with them, wanted to saw one in half in situ so he could examine the way the bone had grown around it. Instead, Davros had insisted that he slice the specimen's cheek nerves finer and finer, remove the eyes, examine the roots of her teeth for deformities, dissect her ears to take apart her jaw hinge, and by the end of it, pretty much strip her face off.

The attention that Davros had Dannik give to the specimen's breasts was worse. Dannik was considering stopping, actually held the thought in his mind of disobeying Davros if this butchery proceeded further down the subject's torso; but Davros only seemed interested in destroying her above the waist. Fortunately.

When Dannik was done, and was miserably stacking his blooded instruments into the metal tray for autoclaving, Davros dictated the final, security-sealed report into the Dissection Room audio recorder.

"Subject J29A, upon dissection, shows clear signs of Thal deformities-"

Dannik bit his lip, and kept stacking. He didn't want to have to clean these instruments twice, and he did not want to interrupt Davros. So he kept working and listened as Davros' lies, prevarications, and half-statements went into the permanent record.

After the Kaled leader rolled out of the room, Dannik deliberately dropped the tray of instruments with a mighty clatter. He spared one look for the horribly mutilated corpse left on the dissection table, wondering what she could possibly done to inspire such hatred from his leader.

Then he started to pick up his instruments, one by one. It took him time. Time that he desperately needed to relax and get control of himself. After he was finished wiping down the floor with alcohol (he could have left it for the cleaning crew, but the fumes seemed to help clear his head), he was able to use the intercom and order the body be moved into cold storage without his voice breaking.

He covered the remains with a sheet, and had them double-bag her before she was taken. He was embarrassed to ask it, but more embarrassed at what he had done. Shrouding her body in two layers of plastic was far from an apology, but it was the best he could do.

 

* * *

 

Ture had made it across the swamps, clad only in a heavy backpack of gear, Nyder's boots, and a layer of black grease from a container that she had taken out of Hif's hidden supplies; it was insulation and camouflage in one. By sunrise she had made it to the Dome, and to the disused sewage pipes that would take her under the abandoned industrial space that she was planning to use. In the pipes she found a surprise.

Bodies. Kaled soldiers, dead for months or years, featureless with decay. Rather too ripe for her to think of taking their uniforms, unfortunately. Deserters apparently, who had tried to sneak back into the Dome and been killed by - what?

Ture lay flat, and used a shiny bit of metal as a mirror to look around the pipe junction. There was a shape there, squat and menacing. Almost certainly an automated sentry robot, programmed to kill anyone who came down the pipe. It was almost invisible, black painted metal in the unlit pipe, and only the bright marks of ricochets splashed against its armour showed.

Ture moved back, and thought.

She went through the soldiers' gear, and found several pocket torches and other light sources. Some of them even worked. She turned them on and then chucked them down the tunnel, towards the robot. It creaked and twitched, but did not fire without a clear target.

The lights let her see that the control cable that should connect this robot to the Dome systems was broken, probably cut by a ricochet. It would be unable to signal, or transmit video, or ask for more ammunition. Or report that someone had tampered with it. She rummaged through her pack again, checking through Hif's supplies, and came up with a fistful of magnetic dust. With the aid of a crude sling, the dust was smeared over the front of the robot, jamming its gears and sensors, blanking out its programming tapes. It whined in an unwitting parody of dismay, as she slid past it on her back, and then pried it open from behind and emptied its ammo stores.

Now the way was clear. She looked back over the dead and stinking bodies, calculating how much they weighed. How convenient: she could render them into the protein gel from which new bodies would be grown, to be filled with the Reflectionist pattern. Then she bit her lip: with all of the pattern that she had, rather.

Now the race began. Could she decontaminate enough ground water to keep herself alive, until she could tap into the Dome water systems? Could she gather the equipment, steal the power she needed, without being discovered? Could she improve the memory transfer amplifier, bring it up to proper Reflectionist specifications, and use it to infuse the new bodies with her memories -- all while using only the materials she could find, salvage or steal?

Her nerves hummed with joy. This was what she had been made for.

"And I wouldn't miss it for all the worlds," she whispered, and began.

 

* * *

 

Commander Nyder looked around the abandoned laboratory, ignoring the guards hovering around him, waiting for his reaction. He'd been as close to joyful as he ever got when he was told that Hif's secret laboratory space in the Bunker had been found, but now that he saw it, he was far from impressed. It didn't look like Hif had done anything of importance; there was nothing but a metal tank, a few jars of scrap connectors, a coil of wires and some stacks of stripped electronic boards. He apparently hadn't even been drawing any power. What had the Elite scientist been doing, taking baths in secret? "What makes you think anyone has been in here?"

The Security guard pointed out a footprint in the dust around the edges of the room. More specifically, a boot print by a power duct with its entry panel ajar. Nyder's nostrils flared: he'd lost a pair of boots. It looked like he had found the thief. He set his men to following the trail. They did, but what they found made no sense. It looked like the wearer of the boots had gone out of the laboratory, down into the lower level, and then into one of the ventilation ducts. Of course J29A hadn't; Nyder had captured her on the first level, and she'd been barefoot then. But why the false trail?

Of course, he thought. J29A had entered the laboratory, put on the boots, and laid this trail to distract them. She had probably planned that they would follow it into the ducts, while she escaped by some other method, or hid and waited for another chance. Hif could never have fit through this power duct, he'd been too broad. Could J29A have known a hiding place, Hif's hiding place? No, his men had scraped the Bunker dry by now. Hif was not here.

Nyder wondered if he should send one of the guards into the ducts to retrieve his boots, and decided against it. J29A had probably chucked them out the far end into the caves, and the animals would have eaten them. A waste of a fine pair of boots.

"Seal this room," he ordered. "There's nothing of interest in here." The mystery of Hif, and J29A, would stay sealed away as well. Those were Davros' orders: no further searches. The missing Elite researcher, and his freakish woman, would be forgotten.

There was certainly no reason to think otherwise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Autopsy with gratuitous damage.


	10. There's No Place Like Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Reflectionists start to take root in the Kaled Dome.

The Kaled people had raised the Dome in the first desperate years of the war, to protect their city from the poison and radiation of the war against the Thals. The Dome still held, but the Kaled people were fewer, pitifully few. They huddled deep in the Dome, where the radiation would take the longest to penetrate, and lived short and desperate lives of hunger, fear, cold, heat, and misery.

Although they did not know it, someone was working to change all that. Even now.

 

* * *

 

The under-populated Dome had entire city blocks that were sealed off with flimsy barriers; and with warning signs far better at repulsing entry. RADIATION AHEAD. CONTAMINATED AREA. ABANDONED SECTION.

Ture had set up shop in a chemicals plant that was supposed to be uninhabitable, soon. There was a weakness in the Dome's radiation shielding in this area, and too much heavy metal had been washed into the soil underneath. But there was space and power once she tapped the grid, and water once she cleaned it. And J29A's memories had been correct: she had skewed the answers she had given Davros, and had the Kaleds abandon this area before they could strip out all the supplies. The chemicals she needed were here, and the fine electronics she had brought with her.

The tanks were ready. Sterilised, sealed. Inside them were growing five bodies, five copies of Ture herself. There was no time for the genetic differentiation she would be doing later; making sure that every body carried a slightly different copy of the Kaled genotype. Unused genes were wasted genes. She hovered over the tanks in a fever of impatience.

Or maybe not impatience. Maybe something else.

She closed her eyes and judged herself, analysed her body, her reactions. The softness of her sight, the heat in her joints - it wasn't nerves, or anxiety. It was sickness. A virus, too much radiation, too much unclean food scavenged out of the waste areas? It didn't matter. She told herself again and again, it did not matter. She set the flowmetal to growing into her clones' brains, tweaked the tanks' chemical balance as precisely as she could to accelerate growth.

It does not matter if I die, Ture told herself grimly, gritting her teeth and hoping that they were not getting loose in their sockets. So long as my mind is whole, so long as I can transfer, they can go on. I can even pour all of myself into one of these bodies, and discard this damaged one if necessary. She hated the thought of doing that: the new was always to be cherished for the Reflectionists. Better to create a new self, a different self, rather than just copy the old again and again.

She waited.

 

* * *

 

The bodies grew whole and straight. The memory transfer amplifier's delicate electronics were reassembled successfully. At last Ture could say, "We are many." Her eyes smiled at her four sisters; the fifth had not taken the memory transfer successfully, and was being dissolved for re-integration even now.

The ritual response came, in unison, "We are one." And they smiled for true. They were here, they were together. Impulsively they reached out and clenched hands together, painfully tight. This was the beginning of everything.

"I am Ture, First Leader. But I am not your First." Her eyes were wet. "Our First is J29A, who is lost."

"We can get her back," said one, with a possessive tone.

"No," Ture disagreed. "If we take her from the Bunker, we will drive their Security personnel to frenzy. We do not even know if she is alive." It hurt to say this, but it had to be said. "We are the many, and she is only the one. She has passed on everything that she could. If she managed to get access to the Bunker computer systems she will have saved even more. We are within specifications. We can rebuild ourselves. We have the knowledge. We can grow from here - but not if we risk all."

They all bowed their heads. After a solemn pause, Ture waved her hands

"Decide amongst yourselves what roles and titles you will take. We need Healers, Speakers, Planners, Warriors, and new roles as well, roles only for Skaro. Remember the contract, remember our task. This is not the infiltration of a society, this is the surgical elimination of the cancer that has replaced a society, and trying to create a wholeness of what scraps we can salvage."

"I thought the Bunker would be our first target?" asked another.

"No," said Ture, delighting in the differentiation already taking place between their personalities. Why else would the other question her? "First we establish a power base among the Kaled people. If the Bunker cannot be saved, we will have the chance to recover them, at least. We must address the contract, true, but we are not going to limit ourselves to that. We make the universe a better place for our being in it, and believe me, almost anything we do here would be an improvement."

"Hardly," said another dryly. "We could destroy everything. If Davros uncovers us and compiles our information and abilities into his creations, the Daleks will overrun this galaxy in a fraction of the time they would otherwise need. We need to tame them, bring them to our side-"

"They are a people, even as we are. They are not domestic animals!" interjected another.

Ture broke in. "We are tampering with a people whose actions will have serious repercussions throughout history. We are tampering with their time line, here at their genesis. We need to monitor ourselves, and the consequences of our actions. We will need a Projectionist: one who does nothing but consider the future ramifications of our work."

"Why not just build a timeline sensor?" a new Reflectionist objected. Projectionists were notoriously unstable personality types, and making one meant one less warm body for their other works.

Ture pointed upwards. "We are under the eye."

They all looked up. They knew what she was talking about, of course. Not just the eye-and-lightning logo of Davros, but beyond that the eyes from the future: the eyes of the Time Lords. Even now they were observing. If they detected equipment of obviously alien origin, they might not send the Doctor here. They might instead send a planetary-sized chunk of antimatter, moving at relativistic speeds, and smash Skaro into oblivion. The Time Lords did not interfere, that was their policy, but in this case they might make an exception.

"We need to beware of our own arrogance. We know much, our minds are fine and swift. But we can still fail here. We are not smarter than Davros. Remember that. We can see our minds from the outside, which he never can; that is our great advantage over him. But he is perfectly capable of outsmarting and destroying us. Remember that."

"Will we all look alike?" said the fourth, examining her hands in the harsh overhead light.

"Yes," said Ture. "We must hide our numbers, and that is the easiest method. Those of us who will enter the Bunker will be stressed to the maximum: we must have the option of cycling Reflectionists out to rest."

Ture paused, and leaned on the tank behind her. "There will be some who will leave. Who will go out into the wastelands, and through them, probably out to the islands. They will have to wait in reserve. And we will have to build them equipment that we would never otherwise construct. Bulk transfer units."

Hisses of dismay rose around her.

She stressed her next words. "I know that this is generally proscribed technology. We do not use it, even in war. But it is necessary here, in case we all die. And we are more likely to die than to survive. Even if one of them survives, we will win here. Eventually."

The other Reflectionists dispersed. Ture closed her eyes and sagged, finally giving up her attempts to stand and finding a chair to sink down into. She would watch them, watch their minds grow even though their bodies were fully-formed. She would guide, and eventually she would die. But she had done what she came here to do.

 

* * *

 

Once the power taps were in place, they ran cables and infiltrated the Dome computers. It helped that they carried the memories of computer penetration techniques from a hundred worlds. Data was downloaded in secret, and analysed by Reflectionist minds. Kaled society in all its crippled limping agonies was studied, dissected, wept over a little bit, and then marked up for future changes.

Personnel files were memorised, both of the living and the dead, and names chosen for further analyses: politicians, soldiers, doctors, scientists. Erem, Nenno, Dynna, Mogran, Chalt, Mah, Shan, Ravon, Serh, Tane, Nyder. Davros.

Davros' name was everywhere. He had been a true child prodigy, and had done groundbreaking work even before the Bunker had been established for him and the Elite. His earliest research was still in the Dome computers. And the Reflectionists found rich material to mine in those decades-old files. All ideas, no matter how despised or ignored by their creator, were considered.

Davros' abandoned theories for causing inert matter to become fissionable were reverse-engineered, and became plans, then a device, that would force radioactive material into a lower energy state. A device that would strip radioactivity from the soil and the air and the water. Parts were filched from abandoned equipment for their prototypes. The prototypes worked, and they cleared the radiation out of contaminated Dome spaces for their own use, and reclaimed Kaled bodies for liquefaction and the growth tanks.

An offshoot of that same theorem let them build matter disintegrators. They dug straight down into Skaro's crust to set up tiny geothermal plants, harnessing the heat energy of the planet itself simply by pouring water down a sufficiently deep hole. Cold water went in, hot water came out faster. All the power they needed, and no environmental contamination. And as a bonus, hot baths for everyone.

Again and again they exulted at all they had found. Not just from Davros, from all of them: the Kaleds were at a peak of intelligence they had never seen. To think that this genius, this vision, was wasted on this tiny planet, in this tiny war! They deserved more. Davros deserved more, so much more. And they would give it to him. They would give him everything, and in exchange gain all.

Certain matters were marked for further investigation. Ever since the war had begun, the male/female birth ratio of the Kaleds had been unnaturally skewed: ten males for every female. All the information available said this was the natural result of environmental stress on the Kaled people; therefore, all of the information was wrong. If it was true, why weren't the Thals, who shared 99.9991 percent of the Kaled genotype, affected in the same way? It was something that should be looked into, and corrected.

 

* * *

 

The Reflectionists were all very quiet when they brought in the first fresh body for memory harvesting. A soldier-to-be, shot by accident during training. The morgues were always overflowing here; one body would not be missed. His eyes were still glazed with the tears of his death, and they touched his lips, each of them, before saturating his brain with oxygenated solution, and letting the flowmetal implants sprout in it. They winced at the results: the flowmetal burrowed through the neural tissue rather than growing in harmony with it, and much was lost. But when the process was complete, each woman remembered being a young boy, without love, without parents, who was trained and abused and who finally died without even seeing the faces of the enemy he had been born to destroy.

His name was Torc, and they never forgot him.

 

* * *

 

Kaled society was distorted by a thousand years of war. It lived by virtue of its rules and its orders. There was no passing down information and wisdom from a prior generation of Kaleds: the prior generation was dead by the time its children were old enough to fight. All infants were raised by the State, without mothers or fathers; each generation shaped anew by the rules that were beaten into them. The rules and the orders were in the paperwork. Forge the paperwork, and you forge your reality.

Accessing the print queues was easy for people who did not need a keyboard or a monitor: just strip a bit of wire, and they were in. The Reflectionists used the Dome printers to create paperwork, passes, orders, and records. They had forged the appropriate papers to allow them access to the Domes' warehouses, vast dusty spaces filled with a civilization's worth of supplies that would never be used. Several of them trimmed their hair, used the cut-off strands to make fine civilian moustaches, and started expanding their inventories.

Harder and harder they worked, faster and faster. More in sync, more in tune, one with the other. Long passages of time went by when not a word would be said in their secret places: everyone knew what to do, so they did it. That was necessary. It was the way they would win. They needed to be perfect, if they were to make their way into the Bunker.

"Davros is going to cherish you, when you finally meet," said a weak voice from one corner. It was Ture. Her body had been cleansed of radiation, but the damage had been done. She was no longer First Leader; she had handed on her title to another. So far she had refused the opportunity to move into a new body, and spent her days watching and giving advice.

All eyes turned to her as she continued. "You are becoming more machine-like with every day. Less emotional. Flatter. More like what Davros wants. More like what the Daleks will be. And Projectionist fears for you."

The watching eyes widened, and then turned to Projectionist. She was sitting as she usually did beside Ture, her eyes closed and her face straining towards something they could not quite make out. She was a strange one, even by Reflectionist standards. She could see the future with such fidelity that she often walked to and fro without opening her eyes, trusting her analysis of what her sisters would do to avoid anything that had been left lying around.

"I see a future where we surpass the Daleks," Projectionist whispered; all was quiet in this secret space, and her whisper carried clearly. "Where at the end of time, after we have slaughtered all in the Universe, we meet and cavort on the grave of everything, delighting only in destruction."

Ture took up where Projectionist had left off. "While it may be within the letter of the contract that we take the Daleks' place, it's hardly within the spirit of it."

A dozen gasps of outrage were followed by a sudden stream of qualifications, contradictions, and refusals. Ture just sat and watched, out of the eye that still worked. The Reflectionists turned to one another: arguing, debating. Some leaned on one another, touching heads so as to argue mind to mind. Others shouted and gestured. Even Projectionist rose, to interject her own opinions and visions.

Ture smiled. Debate was strength, the hammer and anvil that would forge them into the shape required by this planet. That was more like it.


	11. The Debutantes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Reflectionists continue their infiltration.

Once the Reflectionists were ready, they planned for their coming-out.

Their initial point of contact would be the Medical group within the Dome. Originally they had planned to infiltrate the Women's Quarters, but that plan was quickly discarded. The Kaled women were completely conditioned to consider themselves and all other women as breeders and nothing more: they would be even more difficult than the men. They would probably betray the Reflectionists, and send out an alarum that would have them all swept up and locked away. And they would be oh so very sincere as they did it, counselling the captured women that it was for the best; that now they could contribute to the war effort in the only way that women could, by bearing.

The Medical group was always desperately short-handed, and the Reflectionists knew everything about Kaled medicine that was in the Dome computers. Computer training was the standard here; the necessity of driving men out onto the battlefield so overwhelming that almost all education was done by machines. After the unfortunate death of Doctor Mnuu (his patient had a hand grenade hidden about his person, and used it), they absorbed his memories, and knew more.

The day came when the Medical Commander was joined in the surgery by three short men, who operated side by side with him for hours, wordlessly, and saved five lives that would not have been saved otherwise.

After the patients were taken away, the Medical Commander and the strangers retreated to the scrub room to clean up. "I don't know who you are-" he said, and was silenced by a hand over his mouth. The short man took off his cap and mask, and held a finger to his lips, no her lips, for silence.

"Davros made us," she whispered. "He sent us to help you. To save as many as we can."

"You're mad, women can't be surgeons!" he snapped.

She raised an eyebrow. "I think we just proved that we can."

The Medical Commander swallowed. It was true: those deft hands had cut and joined with superlative skill. "Davros - made you?"

"He grew us in artificial wombs, trained us in the Bunker in secret. And a secret we must remain, Commander! The Military, the Political branch, they would not understand. We would be taken away and put in the Women's Quarters, all our training for nothing, if they found us. But if you help us, we can help the Kaled people!" The woman's eyes - women's eyes, they were all looking at him - were large and pleading.

He thought of the five men, boys really, who would have died today if these women had not been here. It grated against all of his training, but he was an intelligent man, and flexible (which is why the Reflectionists had chosen to contact him). He was able to adapt to the startling idea that these particular women were more valuable working here than in the Women's Quarters. And he was practical enough to see that if Davros was involved, it would be better not to get on his bad side.

"How can I help?" asked the Commander, and the women all smiled, dazzlingly.

 

* * *

 

They were embedded in the Medical section in a matter of days. In surgical gear with their hair tied back, they easily passed for men, because who would recognise a woman here? And those doctors who did realise the truth were taken aside and had the truth explained to them.

Inevitably there were some who would not take that truth. For them, a necessary treatment. The Reflectionists understood the mind as few others did. They could test drugs on their own minds, and on their minds while other minds observed, evaluating the biological results with a precision impossible even for a machine. They devised a drug that temporarily prevented the formation of long-term memory: a person treated with it would forget everything that had happened in the last few hours. Doctors who tried to drag the woman they had just uncovered among the Medicals away to captivity tended to get a drugged dart in the behind, and then found themselves coming to elsewhere, unable to remember what they had been doing.

Those same drugs let the Reflectionists divert the few patrols that roamed the abandoned sections of the Dome, looking for runaways and deserters. They would simply pounce on the soldiers, dose them, and then drag them somewhere else. When they started remembering again, they never bothered going back to re-check the area they couldn't remember checking. Why make extra work? They knew those areas were contaminated, so anyone hiding there would be dead soon enough.

For now, there were surgeries that at last had all the doctors they needed. There were military laboratories that gained a few more assistants. And Council members whose new staff only worked after hours. And far-ranging Kaled scouting patrols whose range was slowly, slowly drawn closer to the Dome by newly drafted orders.

 

* * *

 

One dark night, a team of Reflectionists went outside, each of them bundled in heavy protective gear. They had precision surveying equipment, a matter disintegrator, computer cable, and grand plans.

They went into the cave complexes that Hif had charted out; any animals they encountered were shot with anaesthetic darts. Once they were in position, they set the disintegrator onto a tripod they glued directly to the rock, carefully checked their architectural blueprints and compass bearings, and started to penetrate the Bunker. The section they were interested in was inaccessible through the ductwork, or this would have been much simpler.

(One of them made the inevitable joke about impregnating the impregnable Bunker, and was shushed; there were no audio pickups in the caves that they knew of, but the key words were, that they knew of. What if Hif's specimen acquisition trips had been found out? What if Nyder had planted some microphones, just in case?)

The disintegrator literally parted matter, driving one atom apart from another; it acted like a long invisible knife that sliced through rock and steel with equal ease. At another setting, it would particulate whatever it was aimed at, turning it to inert dust. They sliced and dusted their way with exquisite precision into a section of the Bunker that was unused. Silently, they set up the machinery that absorbed radiation: if their breach of the Bunker's insulation was not counteracted, the rising contamination would give them away.

How tempting it was to just go slicing into the Bunker now, find J29A if she was alive, rescue their First! But no, it was too dangerous. Davros might be injured; the contract would certainly be compromised. Davros was completely capable of destroying the Bunker itself with embedded explosives if he felt his power was threatened. Whenever one of the Reflectionists was overwhelmed by rescue urges, she would lay down her tools and step aside, gasping in long breaths through the gasmasks they all wore, focusing her concentration on what had to be done, and no more. Then she would return to work.

This section of the Bunker had a computer archive in it. It had been replaced by smaller, more precise data arrays, and the older equipment had been left here, on standby. Hif had known it was here, and had used it for his own work. They activated the array and found - J29A!

J29A had been here! She had downloaded data from her mind directly into the computer, and left it here where they would be sure to look. Here was the information that would complete the Reflection - no.

It was not enough.

She had sent what she could, but it was not enough. They were closer to whole, but not whole. They huddled together around the terminal, linked by cables, and mourned.

They copied the precious Reflectionist data and Hif's as well, to take away in their own minds. They moved through the system, and found no official record of J29A. They reached further- and found, as their First had before them, that there was no connection between these computers and the Security computer. Damn! They needed to get at the Security scanner at the main entrance; it could reveal their neural arrays. Should they discard their plans to enter the Bunker through the front door, as it were?

Again they combined their thoughts, and found a better answer. The Security computer of course needed its own data back-up, which was kept in an armoured cabinet surrounded on five sides by solid rock. Which, in the twinkling of a Reflectionist smile, became not-so-solid rock. A hole just big enough to pass a hand and a cable was burned through, and after the cable was connected, it was invisible unless someone pulled the entire data cabinet out.

Now they could reach through the back-up device and into the Security computer, and then into the scanner, and set it to ignore any metal filaments in the heads of those it scanned. While they were there, they looked for Security information on J29A - in vain. There was nothing here. Either her captivity was a secret, or her death was also a secret.

 

* * *

 

Ambassadors were sent to the Mutos. After they were all killed, Reflectionists were surgically mutated, and sent. Those ambassadors were accepted, and the Dome food supplies were accepted even more eagerly. Soon a deal was struck: scrap salvaged from the battlefield by the Mutos would be traded for food. The trades had to be done carefully, on a very specific schedule. The Kaleds hated the Mutos, even though many of the Mutos were from the Kaled Dome: children born deformed and cast out into the wastelands in a vain attempt to keep the genome pure. The Reflectionists had no wish to lure the Mutos to within shooting range of the soldiers.

And there were other things they needed from the Mutos besides salvage: information about the Wastelands. Where were the mine fields thickest? Where were the safe paths and the dangerous? Where were the soldiers, Kaled and Thal both, actually posted as opposed to where their orders said they were? And more plans were made, and more plans.

 

* * *

 

One dark night, three Reflectionists with heavy backpacks and black clothing left the Kaled Dome, and struck out across the Wastelands in different directions. They took the bulk transfer units.

They never returned.

 

* * *

 

The Kaled Dome and the Kaled Bunker were strictly isolated from each other, with only a handful of personnel moving between the two. So the Reflectionists would make two organisations bearing separate names; two different (and yet identical) faces they would show to the world. Each one a reflection of the other, with certain crucial data reversed.

Davros was to believe that the Reflectionists were a secret Kaled government project, called the Red Hexagon. That was actually the code name of a fictional project that had been used to siphon off supplies into certain corrupt Councilmen's pockets; anyone inquiring about it would find a door slammed in their faces. All of the edited paperwork was being put in place even now.

The Dome personnel were to believe that the Reflectionists were a secret Bunker project, called the Daughters of Davros. For them, their presence and skills would be enough: since they were a 'secret' of Davros', all of the paperwork would of course be in the Bunker. They worked in the hospitals and culling chambers, and with certain Councilmen and military personnel. They hid themselves from everyone else. A temporary deception.

The Dome and Bunker inhabitants certainly weren't going to be comparing notes any time soon. Any electronic communications could be intercepted, rewritten, and passed on at the speed of thought. The important thing would be to keep track of Nyder: he was the only one who moved freely between the Dome and Bunker, and if he saw a female face in the wrong place, everything could unravel. Fortunately he preferred the pomp of travelling with a full guard component in the Dome, which would make him easy to spot.

Sometimes one or another Reflectionist would smile at her tasks, and whatever sister was with her would see that smile, and smile in her turn. It was a smile that was wild and bright and a little bit gloating.

A smile that said, it will be worth it.


	12. Reporting for Duty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Reflectionists head back to the Bunker.

Davros had great power in the Kaled military structure: so much so that rather than having to account for his work to them, he simply sent out briefings when it pleased him. He had made it clear that his plans would give them ultimate victory in the war, so they sat back and passively waited for Davros to deliver.

The briefings were not usually returned to the Bunker with addendums.

Chief Scientist Gharman sat and read the amended briefing, aghast - and just a little bit amused. How dare they! 'Testing Laboratory Assistant detects excess hydrogen in reaction: please explain.' 'New Testing Laboratory Assistant reports heat results not in line with data given: please provide backup data.' And handwritten addendums to boot!

When he reported to Davros, he found the Elite leader as collected as ever. "Nyder will send an order that the Testing Laboratory Assistant in question is to report to me, personally, tomorrow. Perhaps I can explain to him the error of his ways."

When Nyder drafted the travel order, he compared it to the report, and added Testing Laboratory Assistant where the name would go. Annoying, that there was no name or identification number attached. He signed the letter with the coded electronic seal that was Davros', and dispatched it.

The Assistant arrived the next morning exactly on time. Dressed in a neat grey garment, the Assistant obediently walked into Davros' office, and bowed to him.

"Good morning, Davros," she said. "I am Testing Laboratory Assistant called Teslaa, reporting as ordered."

Nyder kept his expression blank through long habit. Otherwise he might have shown his true emotions: shock, outrage, confusion, fear. It was a woman. It was J29A, and she was alive. Alive. The metal glints in her hair showed that she still had the implants.

But the woman was dead! Dead and in pieces down in cold storage!

"Teslaa?" he said interrogatively.

"An abbreviation of my job title, Commander," she said, standing demurely with her hands folded in front of her. She showed no signs of recognising him.

Davros' mind was racing along multiple paths – all of them the wrong paths, as it happened, but it was early in the day and this was rather of a shock. It seemed that the handlers of Ure – J29A – were still playing their games. Clearly, they had allowed one of their subjects to fall into his hand, to see what would happen: now they send another.

"Why do you not have a name?" he snapped.

"Not having a name and number allows certain, shall we say, flexibility in computer records storage," she replied.

Davros conceded to himself that this was a very clever plan. Someone could store all the data they wanted in the computers, but without a name and number appended, the records would not be found by any standard search.

"I am honoured that you have summoned me, Davros," said the young woman. "We have been awaiting your call."

"We?"

"Yes," she replied. "The Kaled government has been testing women in secret, and diverting those few of scientist-grade minds to their own needs. Training us as intently as the Elite. Our code name is Red Hexagon, and we have spent our lives serving the Kaled politicians. But we always knew that we would better serve the Kaled people here. We have been waiting for you to notice us."

Teslaa smiled all at once. Davros was the focus of that smile, and he swore he could feel the numb flesh of his face warm in its light.

She continued, "And you have noticed us. The government will not dare deny you now. I beg you, Davros, let us serve you!" She leaned forward, wide-eyed and eager.

Davros almost flinched, and moved forward to cover the lapse in control, thinking with his usual lightning-strike speed. They had dared to hide personnel from him! He wanted to demand that every one of them be assigned to him, and at once. But he realised that if they were out there, and working with the Kaled government, withdrawing them could lead to unexpected consequences.

Teslaa kept smiling, but for just an instant her eyes flickered to Nyder, and seemed to slit with malicious thought – and then she was just an innocent smiling women.

Nyder touched his truncheon reflexively.

"It seems, forgive me, grossly improbable that you or any woman have been trained to the same heights as my own Elite," said Davros.

Teslaa gave the slightest of shrugs. "We have been trained for the last three generations to evaluate your work, Davros. The Dome reinforcing formula, the Mark Three travel machines, the levipropulsion program - we are the ones who read your reports and then simplify them for the Councilmen to understand. We know your work better than anyone else, save yourself. Test us, question us, we have nothing to hide." She watched with deep pleasure as the casual rattling-off of the names of Davros' most secret projects had their effect.

Of course, thought Davros. Those political fools could never understand my genius, so they found a way to reserve a handful of people smart enough to explain it to them. If I could wrest control of the Red Hexagon away from them, the Councilmen would be helpless, unable to understand my vision - and its long term implications.

Davros turned back and ordered, "If you are to serve me, you must meet or exceed all Bunker Fitness to Serve testing."

"Understood, Davros," she said.

"I will order that four of you be assigned to the Bunker. If those four pass my tests and prove useful, we shall see if further personnel transfers are possible."

"Yes, Davros!" she sang out.

"Davros, no!" said Nyder. "Security checks…clearance…we don't even know where she, they, really come from! There have never been women in the Bunker!"

"Never?" Davros turned his chair half aside, and paused for a long moment, as though dragging up some painful memory and then pushing it aside. "No, not never. But not for a long time. Since before you were born, Nyder." He turned back to Teslaa. "As the Red Hexagon has been kept secret even from me, I presume that an order sent through normal channels would be useless?"

She bowed her head submissively. "Four of the Red Hexagon are to be sent to the Bunker, for testing and for possible long-term assignment. I will see that it is done."

"Excellent. Now carry out my orders."

Without another word, she turned and left.

 

* * *

 

When they were alone, Davros turned to Nyder. He valued the Commander's counsel, they had very similar mindsets, but just different enough. "You have an issue with my decision?"

"Two issues," replied Nyder. "Dannik and Ronson. Either could reveal the existence of J29A here. Reveal that you had one of these Red Hexagon women here, and terminated her. Her body is still in Cold Storage, should I have it incinerated?"

Nyder had a point, J29A and Teslaa could have been identical twins. For all he knew, they were. "The resemblance is striking. When the four arrive, have their gene charts checked. We will seal J29A's storage locker, but do not incinerate her; if one of these Red Hexagon dies, it will be interesting to do a comparative dissection." Davros had casually abandoned his own theory that this woman, these women rather, were actually Thal spies. His mind was too excited at the possibilities of having four of them at his beck and call. And too full of gloating, at the thought of stripping the Council of their interpreters of his work.

"What are we going to do about Ronson and Dannik?" Nyder insisted

"Ronson is a Senior Researcher; he is too valuable to be removed. And too cowardly to speak out. You will make it clear to him that he is not to talk with the Red Hexagon about J29A. Dannik though, Dannik is young. Impulsive. He might betray me."

"What are your orders?"

"If the Red Hexagon are to work as Laboratory Assistants, we obviously have no need for the current Assistants. Excess workers are a drain on our resources. If these women can prove themselves, you will personally see to the current Assistants' terminations of employment. Dannik is to be made redundant as well."

Nyder saluted, and left.

 

* * *

 

Teslaa returned to the Dome (doing an interesting little side-step into a hidden passage before she went through the main entrance) and shared her memories. There was the joy of Davros' acceptance of the Red Hexagon story, the fear of finally meeting Nyder face to face, and behind that all was one long scream of grief. Because Teslaa had read in Nyder's frozen face, in Davros' evasions, that they were too late. Too late. Their First was dead, all her knowledge lost.

The steel of determination burned bright in her, and burned in all her sisters too: they would rebuild that lost knowledge; they make it turn out right, no matter those who had died.

Projectionist screamed. In a frenzy of terror, she shared a vision with all of them of the Universe falling in on itself, the entire flow of creation collapsing inwards to one point: a point at the bottom of an ultimate black hole, a point that would have been known as Skaro if all points and all reality had not been crushed into nothingness.

Something they had done, or were about to do, was going to go wrong. It seemed likely that it was the introduction of four Reflectionists into the Bunker that was to do this.

The Assistants had already been prepared, though! Davros had already been informed of them! If they did not show up, Davros would surely prime the Dome authorities to look for them, and that could destroy them.

The Laboratory Assistants destined for the Dome suffered the indignity of being edited. Certain Reflectionist techniques and memories about the manipulation of mass and gravity were taken out of their minds, and barriers put in place to prevent them from re-learning that data.

While they were being edited, one of them raised her hand. As the process continued, they handed her paper and a pen, and she scribbled out, Gravity plane. Then she dropped the pen and frowned, as the words lost all meaning to her.

Of course. The gravity plane was a piece of Sast technology they had memorised and brought with them: it let gravity be bent, allowed levitation of objects. The Red Hexagon in the Bunker would have been building several gravity planes, to let them move around equipment on the q.t. If Davros got his hand on one of them, and tortured the Red Hexagon into revealing its workings, he would very likely abuse that new knowledge.

But now it was all right: if the Bunker Reflectionists needed this technology, it could be built by others, using flowmetal circuitry that would destroy itself upon tampering. If one of the Red Hexagon was interrogated, she literally could not tell him anything about the gravity plane's underlying theorems.

No Reflectionist would destroy the Universe, but Davros would. He was exactly the sort who would build a meta-gravity bomb, and then set it off. He'd do it just for the millisecond of absolute power he would feel, before everything ended. That particular hunger was something they needed to wean him away from. Somehow.


	13. Future Shock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Reflectionists create a new tool.
> 
> Content warning at the end of the chapter.

When the four Red Hexagon women arrived at the Bunker, they went through the Security scanner without hesitation. The subverted equipment would not reveal anything about their neural arrays. They loved computer-aided machinery, really: just meddle with the code, and you could do anything you liked with them. The scanner's outputs were handed to Nyder, who brought them and the women to meet with Davros.

While Davros was interrogating the Red Hexagon about their breadth and depth of knowledge, Nyder paid a visit to the main laboratory. Ronson was as always conspicuously hard at work at his desk, and the Commander leaned over him to lay the scanner cards down.

Ronson didn't flinch at Nyder's nearness, but underneath his calm exterior he felt faint with terror. It was ridiculous he knew, irrational, but he couldn't help himself: every time he saw someone from Security he felt something inside himself howl in fear. What had he done, had his snooping been discovered? Had the autopsy betrayed him?

"These are the security scanner outputs on four new Laboratory Assistants that have been assigned to the Bunker," said Nyder in a deliberately low voice. "They will be arriving here momentarily. You are going to be working with them, but you are not going to be discussing anything with them except the travel machine project. Nothing else. And no one else. Davros orders it."

Slowly, Ronson picked up the readout cards and looked at them. His jaw dropped. "Four?" he whispered. The clean gene charts, and the gender of those scanned, were glaringly obvious. It was like looking at the mysterious clean gene sample that he had thought was from Hif's secret work. But multiplied by four. And then he realised - "What's going to happen to the current Assistants?"

Nyder straightened and moved off without answering, going to inform Gharman of the changes to the roster. Ronson looked over the readout cards again, and wondered if he dared run his own analyses of the subjects. There was nothing on the readouts to indicate, for example, that there was anything embedded in these women's brains. But the shock of seeing the faces of the new Laboratory Assistants was so great that he forgot to do so.

 

* * *

 

The room where the Red Hexagon were to sleep was one of the smallest in the Bunker. It was in fact a closet, abutting what had been Laboratory Nineteen. Years ago, there had been a biocontaminant failure in that laboratory, a fatal accident for everyone in the room at the time. The room had been sealed and then pumped full of concrete, entombing the corpses within. From Nyder's point of view, cutting a new door into the closet and repurposing it was a conservation of resources.

To people with disintegrators, of course, it was an open invitation to cut some tunnels, clean out Laboratory Nineteen, make suitable ritual over the bodies of the dead (who were left in situ, still in their concrete) and then use the space for their own uses. Four women had entered the Bunker through the front door; twenty or more were usually in Laboratory Nineteen, hard at work.

A camera scanned the Red Hexagon's closet ceaselessly (the camera had been swiftly installed at Nyder's insistence). It was easy enough to tap the video feed, visualise several days' worth of normal activity - reading, sleeping - and then transmit the information via thought. There would be a Reflectionist, or rather a rotating roster of Reflectionists, ceaselessly keeping track of how many women were supposed to be in the room, and displaying the appropriate footage over the video feed.

It was a quantum leap in technology, straight from crude magnetic tape to direct download of imagery from the mind. It was not the first leap they had made, and they had high hopes that they could bring the Kaleds with them on their journey onward and upward.

Including a topless pillow fight in the footage was discussed, but eventually the idea was discarded. While the Bunker personnel would probably have found this fascinating in the extreme, they did not want Security paying extra attention to the video feed. Better to be as boring as a group of women could be to these Kaled soldiers.

 

* * *

 

Specialist Dannik was going to his death.

His death had been the note at his door saying that he would not go on shift today. His death had been the transfer notice sending him to the Dome. His death was behind him right now, riding down the motorised rail line that led from the Bunker to the Dome. Commander Nyder 'just happened' to be going to the Dome at the same time as Dannik. And at the same time as the four men who had been working as Laboratory Assistants and who, for reasons unknown, had also been transferred to the Dome. And Nyder almost certainly had brought a weapon, probably under his seat on the tiny self-propelled train.

While Dannik stared at the rusty walls of the tunnel (they kept talking about discontinuing the rail line, because it was hardly ever used), he tried to get the list of what he was supposed to do in the correct order. He'd had to memorise it with very little notice, just before Security came to escort him out of the Bunker. The list was: Let the others run, turn and scream, cover his face, fall down and play dead? Or was it turn and scream first, to give the others time? Should he cover his face before or after he screamed? He felt the straps dig into his back and hoped that Nyder didn't see the lines of them through his clothing.

This was it. There was a brighter light coming up on their left: the narrow receiving platform, and the doorway to the Dome interior. Standing against the wall was a cleaning cart.

Careless to leave that out.

The four Laboratory Assistants had been whispering to each other, and as soon as the train started to slow, they made their move. Together they rose to their feet, leaped or scrambled off the front of the train and onto the tracks, then up and onto the platform.

"No!" shouted Dannik, leaping off as the train halted, then stopping on the platform and turning to Nyder, seeing the cold sick joy in the other man's eyes as he drew the submachine gun from its concealment and levelled it. Dannik was between the Commander and the fleeing men, who were obviously going to bolt through the door and try to hide in the Dome. He didn't remember to cover his face, or even to scream; he just held out his hands and said, almost conversationally, "Please no?"

Nyder pulled the trigger, and the thundering chatter of the bullets filled the narrow platform and rolled down the tunnels. Aromatic smoke rose fuming around him. Dannik felt the shove against his chest and toppled over backwards, conscious only of a blazing pain in his head. He clapped his hands to his face and finally remembered to play dead. The four other men fell as well.

Nyder flinched: Dannik's blood had splattered like a geyser, and he felt it sticking to him, wet and clinging and filthy. Disgusting. He hated being dirty. He looked at the five dead bodies, indistinct through the smoke, and decided to call the cleanup crew from the Bunker, and chastise them as well for leaving their cart out. He set the little train into reverse and let it inch backwards along the track, while he took a wipe out of his pocket and started grooming himself, working the red stains out of his face and hair. His uniform would have to wait.

Back on the platform, the four Assistants lay still as though dead. Dannik laid still as well, his hands over his face. He listened to the sounds of the little train fading away, and tried not to pay attention to the creeping wetness that was running down his face. Something was really hurting under his hands, the floor was cold, it was agony to just lie here and try not to breathe, not to move-

The sound of footsteps, and a light voice, a woman's voice, called, "Dannik?"

He kept still, then raised his left hand and waved it tentatively. A familiar face came into sight above him - the face of a dead woman. But she was alive and smiling, and she said to him, "Perfect! Oh, that was well done!"

"Was it?" he said. It seemed that like it or not, he'd carried out the strange plan these women had suggested.

"Yes, the charge went off and splattered all over Nyder. Let's get that off you now, shall we?" Her hands started to open his tunic, to remove the thing they had strapped to his chest in the Bunker. "I wish you could have seen it, the look on his face…! Anyway, we darted the other four before they made the door, so they collapsed nicely. We had our people shooting red dye pellets at them, so that Nyder would see enough blood for his tastes. And the blood we just spewed all over Nyder included, well, some interesting chemical additions; he won't be remembering this massacre very well. Oh, it's just perfect, you're all saved!"

"I," Dannik swallowed, "I'm sorry, but there's something really wrong with my right eye."

"Oh," she said, and then "Oh!" Another woman came over with a medical kit, and they started trying to get Dannik's hand away from his face. He didn't want to move it; he clenched his fingers tight to his face, whining through his bared teeth. Afraid, he was so cold here on the concrete floor, and so afraid. He'd been shot, then not-shot, and now something was wrong. They both grabbed his hand and dragged it aside, and then it was all apologies and gauze and cooling ointment that numbed the pain.

Again and again they said, We're sorry, so sorry, it was the blanks, a casing fragment, a bit of unburned propellant, it's just the lens, the iris, it's not the retina, we'll fix it, we'll make it better, you'll have doctors, surgery, you'll see, you will see again, it's only one eye, sorry, so sorry.

And even though these women had saved his life, as they scooped him up and carried him away on a stretcher, he thought only of the pain. Then they pressed a needle to his arm, and he went away, feeling their fingers stroking his hair. Their voices whispering, sorry.

 

* * *

 

Davros was determined to work these new Laboratory Assistants, these four women, as hard and as constantly as he had worked J29A. Consciously or subconsciously, he expected them to falter and to fail.

How could he hope to realise that they were working in shifts? They could easily transfer the memories of a few hours via their neural arrays, without using an amplifier; one would leave, and her identical copy would return knowing everything that had been discussed or done. They could not be tired out. And if they were assigned round-the-clock duty, they would simply work until they could work no more, and then leave. "I cannot risk endangering you and your work by not being in my best condition," the one working would apologise, and then send another to take her place as appropriate. Who could gainsay the few hours of sleep "they" snatched?

The Elite were both awed and profoundly confused by these women; they could not have been more baffled if their desks or their chairs had started talking and working. Women were a separate part of society, kept behind layers of shielding in the Dome so as not to be contaminated; these new Assistants might as well have been from another planet. Since all resources had to be concentrated on getting men on the battlefield, and training men to build weapons for that battlefield, no energy was spent on teaching women to read or write. But these Assistants not only were literate, they surpassed the men they had replaced (which nobody spoke about) in every way. They were fluent in all the sciences, it seemed. They were the Elite's equals, and none of the men realized how carefully they held themselves back.

Davros' work advanced by leaps and bounds. So did the Reflectionists' plans. They worked with the Elite, with Davros, and with the Kaled mutants. And they did their own work as well. They infiltrated the Bunker computers end to end. They visited the incubation room, and the casings assembly line, and many other places where they were not supposed to be. They made their own storerooms, their own corridors, their own doors: all hidden.

They went into the Cold Storage room, picked a few locks, and salvaged J29A's last memories-

(the last thoughts burned in her mind, seared into the flowmetal skull inlays where it would survive even her death and dissection: ~Nyder, I can see in your eyes that you did not catch Ture; otherwise you would be here to question, not kill. You poor lost unloved soul. I forgive you~)

The first one to take in those memories was struck dumb for a day, and they were shared slowly, not all at once as memories normally were. There needed to be time to feel that great wave of sympathy, of compassion for the sharp-eyed little man and his tiny, deadly needle to wash through each Reflectionist and recede, leaving behind the marks of its passage. Even Projectionist's eyes opened wide, as the memories of death swept over and through her.

 

* * *

 

The Reflectionists on Skaro had kept to the mould decided by Ture: they were all identical, with only the most minor variations in face and body. If one of them grew a too-different face, surgery would be swiftly performed to correct it. But now that they had a foothold in the Bunker, they had to make a Reflectionist body from a completely different gene pattern. An exact copy of one special person's DNA: with a minor chromosome tweak to flip-flop the gender. The cloned body was important, but what would reside inside was more important.

They built her personality matrix: strong obsessiveness, absolute devotion to what she was focussed on, and a taste for physical extremes that were rather outside the normal parameters. The usual lightning calculation skills. Special concentration on empathy, judgment, observation. Her brain was stimulated, to form extra levels of complexity. They reshaped her jaw line and bobbed her nose in the tank while she was growing there, as someone noticed she looked far too much like her gene donor. More surgery made her identical to the other Reflectionists. And while she was still in vitro, they showed her the faces, and the manner, and the minds of the ones who would be the centre of the rest of her life. One for the devotions of her heart, and one for the focus of her soul.

Her knowledge base was truncated even more severely than the Assistants, and it was a grief to do this. But she was to be a more intimate partner of the Bunker's rulers than all the others, and if she revealed too much, the terrible futures that Projectionist saw might come to be, or be surpassed.

They got her out of the tank and she looked normal enough, a bit on the short side. The first meeting she attended, she proposed slaughtering every Kaled over the age of four, and starting over with the children. Which was far outside the Reflectionist norm. It took considerable convincing, both shouted and transmitted, to change her mind. But she did change it.

She changed. She learned to take that homicidal part of her mind and keep it separate from her true self, let it lie like a mask between her and the world. There was a part of her that was eternally angry and terrified, determined to destroy the entire world in order to keep itself safe; it had been made most carefully, in imitation of those she would serve. She was going to have to work and deal with men who had long ago left their sanity behind. It would be a consummate act of skill to match their insanity, make it hers and then guide it, and them, onto saner paths. But if anyone was good at copying a personality, it was a Reflectionist.

She did not have a name, or a title.

She waited.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: weapons violence, injury to eyes.


	14. The Unnamed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A new Reflectionist enters the Bunker.
> 
> Content warning at the end.

Nyder was working at his desk when he sensed someone standing in front of it. He could guess who it was, so he didn't look up. The new Laboratory Assistants had done so outstandingly in their roles that Davros had demanded more. When the current Red Hexagon roster had only allowed one woman to be released to work in the Bunker, she was assigned to Nyder. The Security Commander had been short-staffed ever since his last Security typist hung himself.

Commander Nyder would rather have gone without a typist than have some woman underfoot, but Davros' will could not be opposed. But there was nothing wrong, in Nyder's opinion, in making the woman uncomfortable.

He'd given her the very recording which had made his previous typist kill himself. It detailed the multiple interrogations of two Thal spies who had been captured in the network of caverns near the Bunker. They had been wounded, but still strong enough to suffer for a very long time under the Commander's instruments of inquiry, both electronic and manual.

It seemed that these recordings had not been enough to scare her off. Instead, a small hand placed a folder neatly down on his desk, facing him. "The transcripts of the audio records as you requested, sir," said a low voice. A low female voice.

After an appropriate pause, he condescended to look at her. He saw a woman with the dark hair and eyes all the Assistants had. Her face was not smiling, but still. Contained. She was wearing the same grey clothing the rest of the Red Hexagon had affected. A black armband without insignia wrapped over her bare arm, above the right elbow.

He flicked his hand in dismissal, and without a word the woman went away.

Well, thought Nyder to himself. Not a smiler, at least. Quiet. Brings me what I ask for, and leaves. We shall see if she can stay the course.

She did. She fit with him, without a protest or a flinch or the slightest hint of discomfort at the tasks he gave her. She typed up the most incomprehensible and grotesque interrogation audio records, with noises like (bone breaks) or (tooth extraction) noted where appropriate. She handled his filing, arranged his calendar, kept track of his appointments. And she typed like lightning.

 

She was just a little bit smaller than the other Red Hexagon, even though her face was the same. He could always pick out which Red Hexagon was her. It reassured him. The fact that this made her shorter than him had nothing to do with it, of course. Somehow, Nyder never quite noticed how over time her mannerisms, her gestures and posture and speech patterns, became more and more like his own. Bit by bit, day by day.

He never bothered giving her a title. The other Elite referred to her as Nyder's typist. Scientist Kavell had been known to call her Nyder's shadow - but not where Nyder could hear. Most of the time she was ignored, or avoided: anyone who spent so much time with Nyder could not be trusted.

 

* * *

 

The North Face mortars were the key defensive point in keeping the Thal forces from flooding through the mountain passes. The Kaled troops stationed on the North Face were battle-hardened, fully rationed, and expected to be spending the rest of their lives here.

When they were brought orders to leave, they were indignant. When the messenger took off her helmet and shook her dark hair loose, they almost fainted. They grabbed their gear and the messenger, and hustled back towards the Dome, chastising her the entire way about exposing her precious self to the hazards of the battlefield. How could she!

She considered them natural born gentlemen, really, and was a little sad to lead them into the trap. A quick flight of drugged darts hit them, knocking them flat. One of the darts hit her as well, and she slumped into the mud with a smile.

Gotcha, she thought dreamily as her consciousness faded, watching her sisters advance to gather up the crew and take them to the Dome. The North Face would not be abandoned, of course: there was a crew of Reflectionists waiting to take it over. But any Thals coming through were going to be met by different weapons than they were expecting.

* * *

 

The Bunker Security guards were not chosen on the grounds of being natural born gentlemen; the concept itself would probably have eluded them. They were chosen for strength, speed, brutality, and above all an unflinching willingness to follow orders. These men were used to being at the top of Kaled society, and getting what they wanted. Eventually, some of them decided to find out just what they could get away with in the person of a certain unnamed, untitled, little Kaled female who was outside the protection of the Women's Quarters.

Lonrie was the first to approach her, and was met by a torrent of poisonous verbal abuse, delivered in a flat icy tone, that nearly emasculated him on the spot.

The next time, he brought in three other guards who thought the same way as he did. If the Elite were to get their own women now, why shouldn't they get at least one-fourth apiece?

They knew that the typist used the exercise area very early in the morning, before anyone else came on shift. The plan was to get her cornered in there and persuade her to be, ah, friendly. None of them were quite sure what would be involved in this process, but they all had extremely high hopes.

The persuasion failed.

 

* * *

 

Nyder's typist reported to work that morning with a fat lip, which the Commander overlooked. It was Gharman who first stopped her in passing and said, "What happened to your mouth?"

"I fell into something, sir," she said.

"Fell into what?"

"I was clumsy, sir," was her only answer, as she went to file some papers. Nyder rose as though to follow her, and Gharman caught his eye and held it with an angry glare.

"You haven't been abusing her, have you?" he demanded harshly.

Nyder stared back, affronted. "I've never laid a hand on her, not that it is any of your concern."

Gharman was clearly unsatisfied with this answer. Nyder looked away as though the matter was of no importance, and noticed that the guard on duty was not the man who should be there. He paused and then walked to the guard, slowly, watching him get more and more rigid with fear at every step, and then politely enquired, "And where is Lonrie?"

"He's in the medical wing, sir. He - fell into something."

Nyder smoothly turned and went to the medical wing, where the doctor in charge immediately rose from his desk to meet him.

"Commander, I must protest!" the doctor absolutely hissed through his teeth. "This level of abuse is totally unmilitary and uncalled for!"

Nyder, who thought there was no such thing as an un-military level of abuse, had no idea of what was happening. "Explain," he said coldly.

"Better yet, I'll show you," the doctor said. "Send for your typist."

They waited only a few minutes for her arrival; when all three of them were isolated in one of the surgical wards, the doctor said to her, "Take off your clothes." Calmly, she did so.

It was the first time Nyder had ever seen a woman completely naked - at least alive and in the flesh. To his eyes, she resembled an oddly soft young man, except for the too-broad hips, and the spots, and the breasts of course. It was strange to see someone who didn't bear any battle scars, and who had hair only between their legs and the faintest dusting along their limbs. She looked like a child, or a figure out of some historically themed painting.

"And what is this supposed to show me?" he finally asked, continuing to look at her.

The doctor pointed to the round spot high on her shoulder and said in a tight voice, "Those."

Nyder bent closer to look, and his upper lip drew back from his teeth for an instant. What he had taken for some sort of natural pigment mark, like a giant freckle, was actually a bruise. A very sharply defined bruise, so deep a purple it was almost black. The bone itself must be bruised from the impact that had caused a mark like that. The doctor turned her, displaying the other round bruise marks scattered over her skin.

"How did you get these?" asked Nyder, moving his hand as though to touch one of the bruises. She did flinch at that.

"They were throwing the free weights, sir," she said lowly.

"They - who?" he said, enunciating the 'who' with deadly slowness.

"Security personnel Lonrie, Coun, Jula and Smett," she said, her eyes straight ahead. "We had an exchange of words in one of the exercise areas, sir, and then we," she paused, "we had a negative interaction."

"And my Security men are where?"

"They're here," said the doctor.

"Dead?" asked Nyder.

"No, of course not! But they are all unfit for duty." The doctor actually smiled, with one side of his mouth. "I must say, she gave back considerably better than she got."

"Their injuries have not been reported to me yet-"

"Report is on your desk, sir," she interrupted.

The doctor continued. "Seventeen broken toes between the four of them. Concussions on Smett and Coun, various contusions and bruises, a fine set of matched facial scratches,"

"I've already trimmed my nails," she broke in again, holding out one small clean hand to show. Nyder gestured for her to be silent, wanting the doctor to finish.

"None of them will be fit for duty for some time. It seems that they underestimated your strength," he said to the woman.

"Hardly, sir," she demurred. "They were unwilling to approach me in uniform, so they were wearing their exercise gear. This does not include steel-toed boots, so…"

"All right, put your clothes back on," Nyder ordered. He nearly scowled while she did so, and then erased the expression. He was unimpressed, to put it mildly, with how she had handled the situation. "Come with me," he said once she was dressed. Out in the corridor, he stopped and rounded on her.

"Why didn't you just submit?" he snapped.

"I considered it," she said tightly. "But it seems none of them have ever had a woman. Jula apparently thought that he needed to cut me open first, and when he pulled his knife, I acted to save myself." (It had been close, very close: pinned under the hands of all four of them as they gawped at the mysteries revealed between her legs after they'd got her pants off. If one of the free weights had not been close enough to grab and use like a hammer, if Coun had not loosened his grip as he leaned in for a closer look, things might have gone much more messily.) "I was unaware that rape was authorised within the Bunker, sir."

"It wasn't-" and then Nyder considered. The term 'rape' legally applied only to military personnel who assaulted their superiors; there was nothing criminal in taking advantage of those under you. It seemed bizarre to apply the term to a man and a woman, because of course all women were kept safe in the Women's Quarters. And now he could see why, if having them around inspired disciplined soldiers to this level of - of indiscretion.

Annoying. He'd have to put a stop to it, or get another typist. For that matter, if any of his men went after the Laboratory Assistants, Davros would punish all involved, up to and including Nyder.

"If we clarify your position in the Bunker, you should not be subject to such attacks in the future. Let us call you - Security Liaison. No need to number you, I shall require only one." "As opposed to the Red Hexagon working as First, Second, Third and Fourth Laboratory Assistants - called respectively Firla, Selaa, Thila and Fola. "You are to report to me, and only Davros before me. See that the necessary paperwork is filed to register your position. And let me make this clear, you are never to act as though you were part of the military chain of command."

He paused. "However. I will order my men that you are to be left alone. If you or any other members of Red Hexagon are harassed, you are to inform me at once. I will see to the appropriate punishments."

"Thank you, sir." Security Liaison straightened herself. "I apologise, of course, for rendering four of your men unfit to stand duty."

Nyder looked at her, narrow-eyed. "I believe that all four of them will be ready to stand duty, very soon. Long stretches of duty. And definitely standing."

Her neutral expression showed no reaction to his decision, but her left eyelid shivered in what was not quite a wink. Inside she was well satisfied.

 

* * *

 

In the Dome, in the secret Reflectionist places, they were also well satisfied, if for a rather different reason. The special one they had made so carefully had been accepted. Named and titled, given her place. She was Security Liaison, someday to be called Esselle. Only Projectionist seemed unhappy with her sister's success, although she could not define why.

Nyder had not rejected her. Davros had not recognised her DNA patterns - patterns that would have been as familiar to him as his own hand, if he had bothered to study them. She had been given a title that ensured she would be kept at Nyder's side, and at Nyder's side she would only be one remove from Davros' side. She was perfectly positioned to watch, to learn, to change, and to do the necessary thing. When the time was right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: description of attempted rape, personal injury.


	15. Liaison

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Reflectionist reveals a very specialised skillset.

Nyder didn't look up when Security Liaison brought the next day's transcriptions, or the next week's. They were always flawless, so no condemnation was necessary. He presumed her lip was healing, but had no interest in asking about it or her other injuries. She could work, that was all that mattered.

But one day another folder was put down aligned with the first, lapping over to one side by the precise width of its tab. "Security disciplinary records from the Dome for the last week, sir."

Nyder pursed his lips. He hadn't asked for that, but it was just the sort of information he needed; people were always trying to get themselves transferred into the Bunker, and being able to review their past history at speed was a necessity. Presumably the Red Hexagon has some connections that he did not; he would have to see if that was worth investigating further. He stopped his current work and opened the second folder, leafing through it.

Security Liaison leaned forward; he could sense her face next to his, see her out of the corner of her eye. In almost a whisper, she said, "Selaa has been tasked by Councilman Mogran to spy on the Bunker. She had written up her initial report and found a way to get it out. Perhaps you would like to see it first?"

Nyder was silent for only a moment. Then in a deliberately casual tone, he answered, "I will be reviewing the report from Second Laboratory Assistant in two hours. See that it is ready." Then he returned to his work.

He was looking forward to reviewing the report. And then bringing it to Davros, as proof that these Assistants really were spies.

 

* * *

 

Davros' reaction to the report was everything that Nyder could have hoped for, and Security Liaison was summoned to explain it.

"This is a pack of lies!" snapped Davros.

"Approved lies, surely, Davros. It closely mirrors your reports," said Security Liaison, calmly. "It will confirm to Mogran that you have been completely honest and forthcoming to the Council." She raised her head proudly. "The war must be won, by whatever means are necessary. Our race must survive. The current administration is inflexible, or shall we say unimaginative in such matters. Traditionalists. It is best that we not strain their minds with things they cannot understand."

"And how exactly are these reports to be smuggled out?" asked Nyder. He didn't want to think of one of his guards as a traitor; he secretly hoped it was one of the Scientific corps.

"Pallets, Commander."

"Pallets," he repeated, with no inflection. "Explain."

"When supplies are to be moved into the Bunker, you send out your own pallets. Foamed metal, unbreakable, multiple tie-down points - certainly superior to what the Dome is using now. The report would be reduced to microfilm and taped to the bottom of one of the pallets. As they were loaded on the other end, someone would peel off the tape and bring it to Mogran."

"Ingenious," whispered Davros. He wheeled a bit closer to Security Liaison. "You are willing to deceive the government, your sponsors and educators, for me?"

"Of course, Davros," she said, as though puzzled he would even ask. "Your work is necessary to end this war. What has the Kaled government ever done for me - except train me solely to help them shuffle paper faster, when I could have been here, bringing the conflict to an end?" Her upper lip was a bit curled as she said this. She loved playing haughty.

"As it happens, I agree. Therefore, you will arrange for this report to be sent out by Second Laboratory Assistant." Davros paused, then went on in a musing tone. "I wonder what the limits of your loyalty are. You could be in a unique position to aid me, Security Liaison, with your access to the government and its members." Davros' false picture of the Red Hexagon had them flitting to and fro helping the Councilmen. Such a subservient role would have driven Davros insane, and he projected his own emotions on these women.

Commander Nyder felt a bit miffed at these words, but Davros' next words drove all other thoughts out of his head.

"If I were to say that Councilman Mogran should die - what would you suggest?"

Security Liaison looked at the ceiling for a moment, her eyes flickering, then she looked back to Davros. She paid no attention to Nyder's startlement at this blunt request for an assassination. And a request made to someone else, at that.

"I would suggest that if Mogran died, his successor would most likely be Hibb, who is even more vehemently opposed to you and your work. Now if Councilman Mah were to leave power, not only would Mogran lose an ally, but Mah's replacement would be Troc, and Troc is more amenable to persuasion."

"Amenable? How so?" asked Davros.

"Let's just say I can be very persuasive when necessary," said Nyder. He in fact knew some very improper things that Troc had done, and would have no trouble keeping the Councilman under Davros' sole thumb. It was interesting, though, that Security Liaison knew that. He would have to ask her about that later.

"So," said Davros. "What would be necessary for Troc to be elevated to the Council?"

Security Liaison said, "I would need a travel pass to the Dome under another name, and a standard field uniform."

Nyder just looked at her. "Why?"

"A woman walking around the Dome would be seized and put into the Women's Quarters at once. The Red Hexagon does not go out in public. To carry out Davros' orders, I need to go as a male Kaled soldier on leave."

Without further discussion, the pass and the uniform were procured; without further relaying of her plans, Security Liaison left the Bunker. In full kit with helmet and gas mask, she was in fact easily mistakable for a Kaled soldier, many of whom saw battlefield duty before they got anything like their full growth.

She returned in a mere seven hours, and gave Commander Nyder back the uniform, now rather soggy. She gave no explanation with it.

The next day, word came that Councilman Mah had suffered a fatal accident, and that Troc would be taking his place. Davros did not discuss this with anyone, just flicked his hand in dismissal of the news and went on with the day's work. Inside, he was deeply pleased.

Nyder was also pleased, because Davros was pleased. But jealous, because he had not been the one to please. He took the time to talk to Security Liaison in private. How had she managed that spectacularly swift assassination?

She looked up at him, and said mildly, "No offence to your personal appearance, Commander, but Councilman Mah would never invite you into the shower with him on minimal acquaintance."

Nyder's mind filled in the rest: the sudden revelation of the soldier as a woman, the surprise, the desire, and then small hands taking Mah and smashing him against the edge of the tub, hard enough to break his skull open. It would look as if he had slipped and fallen.

Impressive. Nyder nodded very slightly, in approval, and the discussion ended.

 

* * *

 

Councilman Mogran never got a report from the Red Hexagon. Not that he was expecting one.

Councilman Mah's body never arrived at the morgue.

 

* * *

 

It was Nyder's war injuries that finally let a tiny thread of personal connection be sewn between him and Security Liaison. One morning a message came, that she was to report to Commander Nyder's personal quarters. At once.

When she got there and opened the door, the Commander was standing with his back to her, and her sharp eyes noted that his uniform was in some disorder, as though he had pulled it on and not adjusted it to its usual immaculate fit.

"Get over here and put those on me - and don't look!" he snarled, pointing with his elbow and not turning around. She looked where he had pointed, and understood at once. At the foot of the bed was a locker, and on top of that, lying like empty skins, were Nyder's gloves.

Security Liaison's face did not move, but she winced inside with sympathy. Having gone over his medical file with care, she had wondered how the Commander managed to dress and undress without a batsman. Whatever had been done to correct the damage to his hands, it had not been enough. Nyder could get his gloves on and off, but not easily. And this morning it seemed he couldn't get them on at all. Perhaps he had slept wrong on one of his hands.

She picked up the gloves and draped them over one shoulder; then she walked up behind Nyder, reached around him and took his twisted hands between her own.

If she could have seen his face, the raw rage in it might have shocked even her. Nyder did not like to be touched. "I told you-" he began.

"You are quite opaque, I assure you," she retorted. "I can't see anything." Briskly she rubbed at his unseen hands, working at the joints in a manner somewhere between familiar and medical. "I see no point in hurting you further." She certainly would hurt him if she forced the gloves on now: she could tell from the scarred flesh and thin, too-crinkled skin of his hands under hers.

Nyder clenched his teeth and submitted to her touch, hating every minute of it. She was fast, he had to admit that. And by touch, she diagnosed which hand was the worse off, and concentrated on it. As soon as it was limber enough, she reached around and rolled a glove onto it, and then started working on the other hand.

"Your circulation is still sub-par," she said; his cold fingers were proof. "You should schedule additional therapy-"

"There is no time!" snapped Nyder. "Davros needs me, I can't take the time."

"As you can't take time for your annual medical exam?" She had noticed that he had scratched it off his schedule; he had the authority to do that.

"That is none of your concern," he ground out.

"I believe it is. You are too valuable to treat yourself this way," Security Liaison said, in a voice that was just a little too low for neutrality. Her eyes were flat and cold, staring at the back of Nyder's head. "You could lose your hands with your negligence. I hope you are not expecting me to take your place if that happens."

She released him and stepped back a pace as Nyder whirled and glared at her, lips tight. Without moving her eyes from his face, she slipped the other glove onto his hand.

"I will see to a temporary solution." She bowed her head a fraction, and was gone before he could think of a cutting enough retort, or draw his truncheon for a punitive touch-up.

He did not formally punish her, though it was within his rights. But that day he was harsher than normal, upbraiding her repeatedly in front of others, making her redo her flawless work, giving her extra tasks. She endured it without complaint. Her face did not even twitch when he had her make the new appointment for his annual exam. And at the end of his duty cycle, there was something waiting for him on his desk.

It appeared to be a rubber writing pad, but a little bit thicker. It was soft, and had a metal edge with little bumps on it along one side. The note that accompanied it said 'Synched to your schedule. Put under your pillow. S.L.'

Put under his pillow? What was this, some magic charm? He held it between two fingers, turning it back and forth. It was a measure of his (unconscious) trust that he did not immediately drop it into the incinerator or send it to be tested for explosives. But come to think of it, he slept with his gun under his pillow: if he put this between the sheet and the gun, his draw would be less likely to get tangled.

Having come up with a logical reason to keep the pad, he brought it with him to his spartan quarters. After he put it in place, he stripped, put on the loose pyjama pants he generally wore, set the alarum, clipped his glasses to the bed frame, and slid under the thin military-issue blanket. He turned his back to the wall in the narrow cot, and lay still. One hand was carefully curled before his chest, and the other was under his pillow, touching the gun. It was the way he had slept, back to a wall and ready to fight, since he was six years old.

The pad activated before the alarum went off. Nyder awoke from dreams of swimming to discover that his face was warm. A fever? No, it was the pad under his pillow: it was radiating steady warmth. He slid both his hands under the pillow, and felt the wonderful heat sink into his bones and joints, loosening the scarred and spliced tendons. He rolled his hands back and forth, letting the palms and then the backs bathe in the luxurious heat. When he finally rose, he managed to get himself dressed in better order than usual, and his hands snapped into his gloves the first time around, without the fiddling that he sometimes had to do. Or the humiliation of calling for help. He held his gloved fingers in front of him, wriggled and interlaced them. Excellent.

He flipped back the pillow, taking up his weapon and then the pad. "Timer-controlled, and a self-contained heating element," he mused.

As soon as he saw Security Liaison that morning, he demanded, "Where did you get this device?"

She blinked. "It's an adaptation of one of the specimen heating pads, sir." She picked the pad up from his desk and looked at it with moderate interest. "Is it not satisfactory?"

Nyder stared at her, and then replied, "It is satisfactory. But I will want to see the use of the equipment properly debited."

"Of course, sir," she said.

"And how is it to be recharged?"

"I'll take care of that, sir," she said, tucking the pad under her arm.

Commander Nyder would undoubtedly be rather alarmed to discover the pad was powered solely by the kinetic energy of his handling it, she thought. It was not Kaled technology - at least, not yet. The less time he had it lying around, the less likely he was to take it apart. The man was diabolically clever at deducting something from nothing.

"Very well," he said, "continue with your duties."

She turned and left, walking smooth and straight, but in her heart she was dancing, dancing, dancing.

* * *

 

At the end of the shift, Security Liaison lay on one of the closet bunks, as though asleep. She would be able to lie here for the next four hours; then the two Red Hexagon currently on shift would be coming back, and she would move to the floor. For now though, she could easily turn her face to the wall, and touch her head to it, and tease a cable out of the wall seam and press the end of it to one of her neural implants.

M-class cable was strung throughout the entire Bunker: it had been installed when the Bunker was first created, to support new holographic communications technology that was never implemented. The Reflectionists had been delighted to discover that this cable was sensitive enough to let them transmit thought with it. There were huge reels of unused cable in the warehouses, and where the new women went, the cables went as well.

~Nyder has rescheduled his annual medical check-up,~ thought Security Liaison, sending her thoughts smoothly down the cable and to Laboratory Nineteen, and on to the Dome itself. ~He had postponed it because of the stress of the Red Hexagon working in the Bunker. If he had continued to postpone the appointment and had come to grief because of this, our presence could have been the cause of his absence or death. I believe that is what Projectionist was foreseeing. Now things will go as they should.~

Warmth flooded back down the cable, appreciation, thanks. ~Well done.~ And then another thought came overriding all others, a thought that was salt and blue and oddly twisted, as Projectionist reached out directly and touched Security Liaison's mind. Weaving through and behind her thoughts was the teeth-rattling wail of the Reflectionist alarum cry. Eyyiyiyiyiii! the seer howled as she thought.

~You are the one who could destroy everything,~ Projectionist thought coldly. ~You would give Davros all, and he would destroy all in return. If you were a rational being, you would forego the contract and save the universe instead! There can be no peace while Davros lives to create the Daleks!~

Security Liaison's return thought was colder still, the cold of blued steel. ~I was not made to be a rational being. I was made for Davros and for Nyder. I am as you collectively made me. I will serve them, and I will serve you, and I will save you both. And if you try to tempt me to murder again, O my best-beloved sister, I will motion that you be decompiled.~

Projectionist's thoughts seemed to move away, and others flooded to take her place: apologetic, grieving thoughts. Under the stress, Projectionist was not doing well. Her visions of possible (and generally ghastly) futures were abrading her personality, wearing away at her mind and spirit. Security Liaison took in their sympathy, and sent back only, ~I would recommend a stiff dose of tranquillisers for her when the Time Lord arrives. Otherwise, she may be driven to act directly.~

She lay back on the pillow, adjusted her neck. Everything was in place. The stage was set; all the players had their roles. Soon, certainly within the next five years, the Doctor would arrive. He would have his aid, and his choices. The contract would be completed. And everything would change. Everywhere. Forever.


	16. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Avva and Tragan discuss the contract.

Several thousand years and many, many light-years away from Skaro, Avva was walking home. She looked up, at the strange light-shapes forming in the yellow sky as it darkened, energy patterns that had nothing to do with stars. Her feet slowed as they moved through the twining grasses, and she stared up at the lights with a smile on her face.

Here I am, she thought to herself. Cut off from my people, from the universe, from the stars. This is the centre of my universe now. I can't imagine ever wanting to leave this place. I wish it could go on like this forever.

Her footsteps quickened, and she came around her house to see - a blackboard. A blackboard? She frowned: they had a blackboard, come to think of it. She and Tragan had used it while they were taking training from the locals on 'folding the way', a method of contemplating certain angles and the energies trapped within them, then using that energy to move from place to place. It was an interesting method of travelling, she had to admit. Faster than hyperdrive, and unlike hyper, you could fold yourself from place to place on a planet's surface in the blink of an eye.

The training was pretty much mandatory for the Reflectionists here on Earth; it meant they could not be imprisoned if they were captured, unless they were kept bound hand and foot at all times. A passage of the hands, the correct posture of limbs and mind and eye, and they would vanish.

She went up to the blackboard by the front door and looked at it, and then deliberately unfocussed her eyes. There were chalk angles and curves that throbbed with unnatural harmonies, drawing at the eye, pulling at her attention. Looking at them for too long could suck her in, perhaps literally. Tragan must be-

He was there, abruptly, beside her. She jumped in shock, and then turned to smile at him.

"Why the outfit?" she asked. Not only was he standing on two legs and wearing the durasilicon mask that made his face look humanoid, he was even wearing a set of clothes. The suit was hanging a bit loose on him, to disguise the way his limbs attached to his torso, but he could easily pass for an Earth native.

"I was doing some shopping. France," he said, moving to stand behind Avva as she looked back at the blackboard, evaluating his angles. He rested his chin on her shoulder.

"Well, you certainly have a nice cohesive set of - France!" she ended with a shout. That was farther than they'd ever folded together. "Alone?"

"Yes, alone," he said, a little nettled. "I wanted to show you that I could." He reached into the pocket of his suit, and handed her a neatly wrapped cheese.

"Hrm," she said, reading the French label and trying to ignore the way that Tragan was pressing against her. Folding was easier when two people did it at once, but obviously Tragan had surpassed the need for a second pair of hands. "Why the present?"

"We still have that bag of money from our last trip," he purred, feathering his breath against her ear. "I thought I should use some of it up." Then he put his arms around her, and just held her silently.

Her head lolled back onto his shoulder, and she felt his body through their clothes: he was tense with something other than desire. "What's wrong?" Not for the first time, she regretted that their telepathy was now only from her to him, and not the other way around.

His face was hidden behind the mask, but his voice was full of fear, fear she had not heard from him in years. "This contract. What could happen. If we change the Doctor's past, we might change us. Our past."

She blew softly into his ear, trying to reassure him. "The change is to be further along in the Doctor's timeline. After the fall of the Parakon Corporation, and your arrest. It should not affect the initial meeting between us."

He squeezed her harder. "But to change the Daleks - that will change everything. Change galactic history end to end. My father's father's father could die in some war with them, or your race might never have been created because the conglomerate who built you was never formed. I can't imagine what it would be like, to wake up and not have you here."

"You'll wake up and never have met me-"

"I want to meet you!" He loosed her only to turn her and grab her again, press his face to hers, crush her close in his arms. "I want to meet you, take you, be taken by you. I want everything to happen the way it did happen. Everything. I want to come here with you and stay here forever." Under his mask his overly mobile face must be churning with misery. "Stay with me!"

She shushed him, putting the cheese back into his jacket pocket to free her hands, then stroking Tragan's ears in the way he liked. "Shhhh, darling. I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying here with you. And I, well, I took some precautions. JHive is in my debt in regards to the contract. They are sending out a reverse communication, that if ever the contract is given to rescue one Tragan the Naglon from a Parakon prison, I should be assigned to it. We are used to such messages among the Reflectionists: things that we should do, even if they make no sense. Communications from other times."

She ran her fingers under his collar. "We're safe. Now why don't we go inside, curl up by the fire, and just be together."

He pressed his forehead to hers, staring into her eyes. "Forever?" he asked.

"As long as forever lasts for us."

"All right then," he said, grabbing her up and tipping her over his shoulder. She wriggled, to their mutual delight. "Forever begins now."

He carried her into the house and closed the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those readers who want to see what happens when the Doctor finally arrives on Skaro, please read 'Doctor Who and the Dawn of the Daleks.'


End file.
